Also standing somewhat by itself is the Heidelberg man. All that we have of him is a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth. It was found more than eighty feet below the surface of the soil, in company with animal remains that make it possible to fix its position in the scale of pre-historic periods with some accuracy. Judged by this test, it is as old as the oldest of the unmistakable drift implements, the so-called Chellean (from Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marne in France). The jaw by itself would suggest a gorilla, being both chinless and immensely powerful. The teeth, however, are human beyond question, and can be matched, or perhaps even in respect to certain marks of primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient skulls of the Neanderthal order, if not also amongst modern ones from Australia.

We may next consider the Neanderthal group of skulls, so named after the first of that type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley close to Dusseldorf in the Rhine basin. A narrow head, with low and retreating forehead, and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at least twice the brain capacity of any gorilla, set the learned world disputing whether this was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot. It was unfortunate that there were no proofs to hand of the age of these relics. After a while, however, similar specimens began to come in. Thus in 1866 the jaw of a woman, displaying a tendency to chinlessness combined with great strength, was found in the Cave of La Naulette in Belgium, associated with more or less dateable remains of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer. A few years earlier, though its importance was not appreciated at the moment, there had been discovered, near Forbes' quarry at Gibraltar, the famous Gibraltar skull, now to be seen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Any visitor 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 as before, supplemented by the most extraordinary eye-holes that were ever seen, vast circles widely separated from each other. And other peculiar features will reveal themselves on a close inspection; for instance, the horseshoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth are arranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the face due to the absence of the depressions that in our own case run down on each side from just outside the nostrils towards the corners of the mouth.

And now at the present time we have twenty or more individuals of this Neanderthal type to compare. The latest discoveries are perhaps the most interesting, because in two and perhaps other cases the man has been properly buried. Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the French department of Correze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closely recalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floor of a low grotto. It lay on its back, head to the west, with one arm bent 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. In the 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 support the head upon a carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the left arm was stretched out, so that the hand might be near a magnificent oval stone-weapon chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by design. So much for these men of the Neanderthal type, denizens of the mid-palaeolithic world at the very latest. Ape-like they doubtless are in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all their separate features occur here and there amongst modern Australian natives. And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believe in a life after death. There is something to think about in that.

Without going outside Europe, we have, however, to reckon with at least two other types of very early head-form.

In one of the caves of Mentone known as La Grotte des Enfants two skeletons from a low stratum were of a primitive type, but unlike the Neanderthal, and have been thought to show affinities to the modern negro. As, however, no other Proto-Negroes are indisputably forthcoming either from Europe or from any other part of the world, there is little at present to be made out about this interesting racial type.

In the layer immediately above the negroid remains, however, as well as in other caves at Mentone, were the bones of individuals of quite another order, one being positively a giant. They are known as the Cro-Magnon race, after a group of them discovered in a rock shelter of that name on the banks of the Vezere. These particular people can be shown to be Aurignacian—that is to say, to have lived just after the Mousterian men of the Neanderthal head-form. If, however, as has been already suggested, the Galley Hill individual, who shows affinities to the Cro-Magnon type, really goes back to the drift-period, then we can believe that from very early times there co-existed in Europe at least two varieties; and these so distinct, that some authorities would trace the original divergence between them right back to the times before man and the apes had parted company, linking the Neanderthal race with the gorilla and the Cro-Magnon race with the orang. The Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly developed. The forehead is high, and the chin shapely, whilst neither the brow-ridge nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neanderthal type. Whether this race survives in modern Europe is, as was said in the last chapter, highly uncertain. In certain respects—for instance, in a certain shortness of face—these people present exceptional features; though some think they can still find men of this type in the Dordogne district. Perhaps the chances are, however, considering how skulls of the neolithic period prove to be anything but uniform, and suggest crossings between different stocks, that we may claim kinship to some extent with the more good-looking of the two main types of palaeolithic man—always supposing that head-form can be taken as a guide. But can it? The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads; the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, have long heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, or nearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences of head-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark is liable to deceive.

* * * * *

We have sufficiently considered the use to which the particular race-mark of head-form has been put in the attempted classification of the very early men who have left their bones behind them. Let us now turn to another race-mark, namely colour; because, though it may really be less satisfactory than others, for instance hair, that is the one to which ordinary people naturally turn when they seek to classify by races the present inhabitants of the earth.

When Linnaeus in pre-Darwinian days distinguished four varieties of man, the white European, the red American, the yellow Asiatic, and the black African, he did not dream of providing the basis of anything more than an artificial classification. He probably would have agreed with Buffon in saying that in every case it was one and the same kind of man, only dyed differently by the different climates. But the Darwinian is searching for a natural classification. He wants to distinguish men according to their actual descent. Now race and descent mean 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 that form the inheritance. Can colour serve for a race-mark in this profound sense? 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 of the hand, that may go along with useful qualities, but in itself seems to be a meaningless accident? Well, as some unfortunate people will be able to tell you, colour is still a formidable handicap in the struggle for existence. Not to consider the colour-prejudice in other aspects, there is no gainsaying the part it plays in sexual selection at this hour. The lower animals appear to be guided in the choice of a mate by externals of a striking and obvious sort. And men and women to this day marry more with their eyes than with their heads.

The coloration of man, however, though it may have come to subserve the purposes of mating, does not seem in its origin to have been like the bright coloration of the male bird. It was not something wholly useless save as a means of sexual attraction, though in such a capacity useful because a mark of vital vigour. Colour almost certainly developed in strict relation to climate. Right away in the back ages we must place what Bagehot has called the race-making epoch, when the chief bodily differences, including differences of colour, arose amongst men. In those days, we may suppose, natural selection acted largely on the body, because mind had not yet become the prime condition of survival. The rest is a question of pre-historic geography. Within the tropics, the habitat of the man-like apes, and presumably of the earliest men, a black skin protects against sunlight. A white skin, on the other hand—though this is more doubtful—perhaps economizes sun-heat in colder latitudes. Brown, yellow and the so-called red are intermediate tints suitable to intermediate regions. It is not hard to plot out in the pre-historic map of the world geographical provinces, or "areas of characterization," where races of different shades corresponding to differences in the climate might develop, in an isolation more or less complete, such as must tend to reinforce the process of differentiation.

Let it not be forgotten, however, that individual plasticity plays its part too in the determination of human colour. The Anglo-Indian planter is apt to return from a long sojourn in the East with his skin charged with a dark pigment which no amount of Pears' soap will remove during the rest of his life. It would be interesting to conduct experiments, on the lines of those of Professor Boas already mentioned, with the object of discovering in what degree the same capacity for amassing protective pigment declares itself in children of European parentage born in the tropics or transplanted thither during infancy. Correspondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to bleach in cold countries needs to be studied. In the background, too, lurks the question whether such effects of individual plasticity can be transmitted to offspring, and become part of the inheritance.

One more remark upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilized peoples, 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 of white drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, the colour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protective pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared with capacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its vital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run, it would seem—perhaps only in the very long run—it will become dissociated from that general fitness to survive under particular climatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this as it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheer considerations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the races of darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualities of 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, more than ever, we are all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. What is to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost the same thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolution of life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limiting or obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the old pre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and thereby simply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would never do. Body and soul are, for the working purposes of science, to be conceived as in perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of life, and as such subject to a common development. Heredity, then, must be assumed to apply to both equally. In proportion as there is plastic mind there will be plastic body.

Unfortunately, the most plastic part of body is likewise the hardest to observe, at any rate whilst it is alive, namely, the brain. No certain criterion of heredity, then, is likely to be available from this quarter. You will see it stated, for instance, that the size of the brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. This is extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average European shows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushman. But then you have to write off so much for their respective types of body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the end you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European may 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 cavity are said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians. Clearly, then, something is wrong with this test. Nor, if the brain itself be examined after death, and the form and number of its convolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-power any more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect the difference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, but not the difference between a fool and a genius.

We cross the uncertain line that divides the bodily from the mental when we subject the same problem of hereditary mental endowment to the methods of what is known as experimental psychology. Thus acuteness of sight, hearing, taste, smell and feeling are measured by various ingenious devices. Seeing what stories travellers bring back with them about the hawk-like vision of hunting races, one might suppose that such comparisons would be all in their favour. The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, however, of which Dr. Haddon was the leader, included several well-trained psychologists, who devoted special attention to this subject; and their results show that the sensory powers of these rude folk were on the average much the same as those of Europeans. It is the hunter's experience only that enables him to sight the game at an immense distance. There are a great many more complicated tests of the same type designed to estimate the force of memory, attention, association, reasoning and other faculties that most people would regard as purely mental; whilst another set of such tests deals with reaction to stimulus, co-ordination between hand and eye, fatigue, tremor, and, most ingenious perhaps of all, emotional excitement as shown through the respiration—phenomena which are, as it were, mental and bodily at once and together. Unfortunately, psychology cannot distinguish in such cases between the effects of heredity and those of individual experience, whether it take the form of high culture or of a dissipated life. Indeed, the purely temporary condition of body and mind is apt to influence the results. A man has been up late, let us say, or has been for a long walk, or has missed a meal; obviously his reaction-times, his record for memory, and so on, will show a difference for the worse. Or, again, the subject may confront the experiment in very various moods. At one moment he may be full of vanity, anxious to show what superior qualities he possesses; whilst at another time he will be bored. Not to labour the point further, these methods, whatever they may become in the future, are at present unable to afford any criterion whatever of the mental ability that goes with race. They are fertile in statistics; but an interpretation of these statistics that furthers our purpose is still to seek.

But surely, it will be said, we can tell an instinct when we come across it, 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 of mechanism, as fixed as fate, is quite out of fashion. It is now known to be highly plastic in many cases, to vary considerably in individuals, and to involve conscious processes, thought, feeling and will, at any rate of an elementary kind. Again, how are you going to isolate an instinct? Those few automatic responses to stimulation that appear shortly after birth, as, for instance, sucking, may perhaps be recognized, since parental training and experience in general are out of the question here. But what about the instinct or group of instincts answering to sex? This is latent until a stage of life when experience is already in full swing. Indeed, psychologists are still busy discussing whether man has very few instincts or whether, on the contrary, he appears to have few because he really has so many that, in practice, they keep interfering with one another all the time. In support of the latter view, it has been recently suggested by Mr. McDougall that the best test of the instincts that we have is to be found in the specific emotions. He believes that every instinctive process consists of an afferent part or message, a central part, and an efferent part or discharge. At its two ends the process is highly plastic. 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, or disgusted, to be puffed up, or cast down, or to be affected with tenderness—all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, and various more complicated emotions arising out of their combinations with each other, are common to all men, and bespeak in them deep-seated tendencies to react on stimulation in relatively particular and definite ways. And there is much, I think, to be said in favour of this contention.

Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a criterion whereby the different races 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 customs and grades of culture tend to bring special types of feeling to the fore.

Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one would naturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yet some experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and white women, by means of the test of the effects of emotion on respiration, brought out the former as decidedly the more stolid of the 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 down most of them as apathetic, when not tuned up to concert-pitch by a dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus the 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 trying to show that, considered anthropologically—that is to say, in terms of pure theory—race or breed remains something which we cannot at present isolate, though we believe it to be there. Practice, meanwhile, must wait on theory; mere prejudices, bad as they are, are hardly worse guides to action than premature exploitations of science.

As regards the universal brotherhood of man, the most that can be said is this: The old ideas about race as something hard and fast for all time are distinctly on the decline. Plasticity, or, in other words, the power of adaptation to environment, has to be admitted to a greater share 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 be that use-inheritance somehow incorporates its effects in the offspring of the plastic parents. Or it may be simply that plasticity increases with inter-breeding on a wider basis. These problems have still to be solved.

As regards eugenics, there is no doubt that a vast and persistent elimination of lives goes on even in civilized countries. It has been calculated that, of every hundred English born alive, fifty do not survive to breed, and, of the remainder, half produce three-quarters of the next generation. But is the elimination selective? We can hardly doubt that it is to some extent. But what its results are—whether it mainly favours immunity from certain diseases, or the capacity for a sedentary life in a town atmosphere, or intelligence and capacity for social service—is largely matter of guesswork. How, then, can we say what is the type to breed from, even if we confine our attention to one country? If, on the other hand, we look farther afield, and study the results of race-mixture or "miscegenation," we but encounter fresh puzzles. That the half-breed is an unsatisfactory person may be true; and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing are somehow discounted, the race problem remains exactly where it was. Or, again, it may be true that miscegenation increases human fertility, as some hold; but, until it is shown that the increase of fertility does not merely result in flooding the world with inferior types, we are no nearer to a solution.

If, then, there is a practical moral to this chapter, it is merely this: to encourage anthropologists to press forward with their study of race; and in the meantime to do nothing rash.



CHAPTER IV ENVIRONMENT

When a child is born it has been subjected for some three-quarters of a year already to the influences of environment. Its race, indeed, was fixed once for all at the moment of conception. Yet that superadded measure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal—that is to say, maternal—environment. Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of relief. Why? Because to improve the race by way of eugenics, though doubtless feasible within limits, remains an unrealized possibility through our want of knowledge. On the other hand, to improve the physical environment is fairly straight-ahead work, once we can awake the public conscience to the need of undertaking this task for the benefit of all classes of the community alike. If civilized man wishes to boast of being clearly superior to the rest of his kind, it must be mainly in respect to his control over the physical environment. Whatever may have been the case in the past, it seems as true now-a-days to say that man makes his physical environment as that his physical environment makes him.

Even if this be granted, however, it remains the fact that our material circumstances in the widest sense of the term play a very decisive part in the shaping of our lives. Hence the importance of geographical studies as they bear on the subject of man. From the moment that a child is conceived, it is subjected to what it is now the fashion to call a "geographic control." Take the case of the child of English parents born in India. Clearly several factors will conspire to determine whether it lives or dies. For simplicity's sake let us treat them as three. First of all, there is the fact that the child belongs to a particular cultural group; in other words, that it has been born with a piece of paper in its mouth representing one share in the British Empire. Secondly, there is its race, involving, let us say, blue eyes and light hair, and a corresponding constitution. Thirdly, there is the climate and all that goes with it. Though in the first of these respects the white child is likely to be superior to the native, inasmuch as it will be tended with more careful regard to the laws of health; yet such disharmony prevails between the other two factors of race and climate, that it will almost certainly die, if it is not removed at a certain age from the country. Possibly the English could acclimatize themselves in India at the price of an immense toll of infant lives; but it is a price which they show no signs of being willing to pay.

What, then, are the limits of the geographical control? Where does its influence begin and end? Situation, race and culture—to reduce it to a problem of three terms only—which of the three, if any, in the long run controls the rest? Remember that the anthropologist is trying to be the historian of long perspective. History which counts by years, proto-history which counts by centuries, pre-history which counts by millenniums—he seeks to embrace them all. He sees the English in India, on the one hand, and in Australia on the other. Will the one invasion prove an incident, he asks, and the other an event, as judged by a history of long perspective? Or, again, there are whites and blacks and redskins in the southern portion of the United States of America, having at present little in common save a common climate. Different races, different cultures, a common geographical situation—what net result will these yield for the historian of patient, far-seeing anthropological outlook? Clearly there is here something worth the puzzling out. But we cannot expect to puzzle it out all at once.

In these days geography, in the form known as anthropo-geography, is putting forth claims to be the leading branch of anthropology. And, doubtless, a thorough grounding in geography must henceforth be part of the anthropologist's equipment.[3] The schools of Ratzel in Germany and Le Play in France are, however, fertile in generalizations that are far too pretty to be true. Like other specialists, they exaggerate the importance of their particular brand of work. The full meaning of life can never be expressed in terms of its material conditions. I confess that I am not deeply moved when Ratzel announces that man is a piece of the earth. Or when his admirers, anxious to improve on this, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass, proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittent biosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that the last word has been said about him.

[Footnote 3: Thus the reader of the present work should not fail to study also Dr. Marion Newbigin's Geography in this series.]

Or, again, listen for a moment to M. Demolins, author of a very suggestive book, Comment la route cree le type social ("How the road creates 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 reply is, Race. But race explains nothing; for it remains to discover what has produced the diversity of races. Race is not a cause; it is a consequence. The first and decisive cause of the diversity of peoples and 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 history would repeat itself in its main lines. There might well be secondary differences, for example, in certain manifestations of public life, in political revolutions, to which we assign far too great an importance; 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 takes the form of an unverifiable prophecy. Let the level-headed anthropologist beware, however, lest he put all his eggs into one basket. Let him seek to give each factor in the problem its due. Race must count for something, or why do not the other animals take a leaf out of our book and build up rival civilizations on suitable sites? Why do men herd cattle, instead of the cattle herding the men? We are rational beings, in other words, because we have it in us to be rational beings. Again, culture, with the intelligence and choice it involves, counts for something too. It is easy to argue that, since there were the Asiatic steppes with the wild horses ready to hand in them, man was bound sooner or later to tame the horse and develop the characteristic culture of the nomad type. Yes, but why did man tame the horse later rather than sooner? And why did the American redskins never 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 to utilize the elephant? Is it because these things cannot be done, or because man has not found out how to do them?

When all allowances, however, are made for the exaggerations almost pardonable in a branch of science still engaged in pushing its way to the front, anthropo-geography remains a far-reaching method of historical 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 map of the earth at his elbow.

First of all, let him imagine his world of man stationary. Let him plot out in turn the distribution of heat, of moisture, of diseases, of vegetation, of food-animals, of the physical types of man, of density of population, of industries, of forms of government, of religions, of languages, and so on and so forth. How far do these different distributions bear each other out? He will find a number of things that go together in what will strike him as a natural way. For instance, all along the equator, whether in Africa or South America or Borneo, he will find them knocking off work in the middle of the day in order to take a siesta. On the other hand, other things will not agree so well. Thus, though all will be dark-skinned, the South Americans will be coppery, the Africans black, and the men of Borneo yellow.

Led on by such discrepancies, perhaps, he will want next to set his world of man in movement. He will thereupon perceive a circulation, so to speak, amongst the various peoples, suggestive of interrelations of a new type. Now so long as he is dealing in descriptions of a detached kind, concerning not merely the physical environment, but likewise the social adjustments more immediately corresponding thereto, he will be working at the geographical level. Directly it comes, however, to a generalized description or historical explanation, as when he seeks to show that here rather than there a civilization is likely to arise, geographical considerations proper will not suffice. Distribution is merely one aspect of evolution. Yet that it is a very important aspect will now be shown by a hasty survey of the world according to geographical regions.

* * * * *

Let us begin with Europe, so as to proceed gradually from the more known to the less known. Lecky has spoken of "the European epoch of the human mind." What is the geographical and physical theatre of that epoch? We may distinguish—I borrow the suggestion from Professor Myres—three stages in its development. Firstly, there was the river-phase; next, the Mediterranean phase; lastly, the present-day Atlantic phase. Thus, to begin with, the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates were each the home of civilizations both magnificent and enduring. They did not spring up spontaneously, however. If the rivers helped man, man also helped the rivers by inventing systems of irrigation. Next, from Minoan days right on to the end of the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean basin was the focus of all the higher life in the world, if we put out of sight the civilizations of India and China, together with the lesser cultures of Peru and Mexico. I will consider this second phase especially, because it is particularly instructive from the geographical standpoint. Finally, since the time of the discovery of America, the sea-trade, first called into existence as a civilizing agent by Mediterranean conditions, has shifted its base to the Atlantic coast, and especially to that land of natural harbours, the British Isles. We must give up thinking in terms of an Eastern and Western Hemisphere. The true distinction, as applicable to modern times, is between a land-hemisphere, with the Atlantic coast of Europe as its centre, and a sea-hemisphere, roughly coinciding with the Pacific. The Pacific is truly an ocean; but the Atlantic is becoming more of a "herring-pond" every day.

Fixing our eyes, then, on the Mediterranean basin, with its Black Sea extension, it is easy to perceive that we have here a well-defined geographical province, capable of acting as an area of characterization as perhaps no other in the world, once its various peoples had the taste and ingenuity to intermingle freely by way of the sea. The first fact to note is the completeness of the ring-fence that shuts it in. From the Pyrenees right along to Ararat runs the great Alpine fold, like a ridge in a crumpled table-cloth; the Spanish Sierras and the Atlas continue the circle to the south-west; and the rest is desert. Next, the configuration of the coasts makes for intercourse by sea, especially on the northern side with its peninsulas and islands, the remains of a foundered and drowned mountain-country. This same configuration, considered in connection with the flora and fauna that are favoured by the climate, goes far to explain that discontinuity of the political life which encouraged independence whilst it prevented self-sufficiency. The forest-belt, owing to the dry summer, lay towards the snow-line, and below it a scrub-belt, yielding poor hunting, drove men to grow their corn and olives and vines in the least swampy of the lowlands, scattered like mere oases amongst the hills and promontories.

For a long time, then, man along the north coasts must have been oppressed rather than assisted by his environment. It made mass-movements impossible. Great waves of migration from the steppe-land to the northeast, or from the forest-land to the north-west, would thunder on the long mountain barrier, only to trickle across in rivulets and form little pools of humanity here and there. Petty feuds between plain, shore, and mountain, as in ancient Attica, would but accentuate the prevailing division. Contrariwise, on the southern side of the Mediterranean, where there was open, if largely desert, country, there would be room under primitive conditions for a homogeneous race to multiply. It is in North Africa that we must probably place the original hotbed of that Mediterranean race, slight and dark with oval heads and faces, who during the neolithic period colonized the opposite side of the Mediterranean, and threw out a wing along the warm Atlantic coast as far north as Scotland, as well as eastwards to the Upper Danube; whilst by way of south and east they certainly overran Egypt, Arabia, and Somaliland, with probable ramifications still farther in both directions. At last, however, in the eastern Mediterranean was learnt the lesson of the profits attending the sea-going life, and there began the true Mediterranean phase, which is essentially an era of sea-borne commerce. Then was the chance for the northern shore with its peninsular configuration. Carthage on the south shore must be regarded as a bold experiment that did not answer. The moral, then, would seem to be that the Mediterranean basin proved an ideal nursery for seamen; but only as soon as men were brave and clever enough to take to the sea. The geographical factor is at least partly consequence as well as cause.

* * * * *

Now let us proceed farther north into what was for the earlier Mediterranean folk the breeding-ground of barbarous outlanders, forming the chief menace to their circuit of settled civic life. It is necessary to regard northern Europe and northern Asia as forming one geographic province. Asia Minor, together with the Euphrates valley and with Arabia in a lesser degree, belongs to the Mediterranean area. India and China, with the south-eastern corner of Asia that lies between them, form another system that will be considered separately later on.

The Eurasian northland consists naturally, that is to say, where cultivation has not introduced changes, of four belts. First, to the southward, come the mountain ranges passing eastwards into high plateau. Then, north of this line, from the Lower Danube, as far as China, stretches a belt of grassland or steppe-country at a lower level, a belt which during the milder periods of the ice-age and immediately after it must have reached as far as the Atlantic. Then we find, still farther to the north, a forest belt, well developed in the Siberia of 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 lichen known as reindeer moss, whilst to the west, as, for instance, in our islands, moors and bogs represent this zone of barren lands in a milder form.

The mountain belt is throughout its entire length the home of round-headed peoples, the so-called Alpine race, which is generally supposed to have originally come from the high plateau country of Asia. These round-headed men in western Europe appear where-ever there are hills, throwing out offshoots by way of the highlands of central France into Brittany, and even reaching the British Isles. Here they introduced the use of bronze (an invention possibly acquired by contact with Egyptians in the near East), though without leaving any marked traces of themselves amongst the permanent population. At the other end of Europe they affected Greece by way of a steady though limited infiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hills as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But are these round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward a rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-faced Boer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into a round-headed pony, so it is in a few generations with human mountaineers, irrespective of their breed. This is almost certainly to overrate the effects of environment. At the same time, in the present state of our knowledge, it would be premature either to affirm or deny that in the very long run round-headedness goes with a mountain life.

The grassland next claims our attention. Here is the paradise of the horse, and consequently of the horse-breaker. Hence, therefore, came the charging multitudes of Asiatic marauders who, after many repulses, broke through the Mediterranean cordon, and established themselves as the modern Turks; whilst at the other end of their beat they poured into China, which no great wall could avail to save, and established the Manchu domination. Given the steppe-country and a horse-taming people, we might seek, with the anthropo-geographers of the bolder sort, to deduce the whole way of life, the nomadism, the ample food, including the milk-diet infants need and find so hard to obtain farther south, the communal system, the patriarchal type of authority, the caravan-system that can set the whole horde moving along like a swarm of locusts, and so on. But, as has been already pointed out, the horse had to be tamed first. Palaeolithic man in western Europe had horse-meat in abundance. At Solutre, a little north of Lyons, a heap of food-refuse 100 yards long and 10 feet high largely consists of the bones of horses, most of them young and tender. This shows that the old hunters knew how to enjoy the passing hour in their improvident way, like the equally reckless Bushmen, who have left similar Golgothas behind them in South Africa. Yet apparently palaeolithic man did not tame the horse. Environment, in fact, can only give the hint; and man may not be ready to take it.

The forest-land of the north affords fair hunting in its way, but it is doubtful if it is fitted to rear a copious brood of men, at any rate so long as stone weapons are alone available wherewith to master the vegetation and effect clearings, whilst burning the brushwood down is precluded by the damp. Where the original home may have been of the so-called Nordic race, the large-limbed fair men of the Teutonic world, remains something of a mystery; though it is now the fashion to place it in the north-east of Europe rather than in Asia, and to suppose it to have been more or less isolated from the rest of the world by formerly existing sheets of water. Where-ever it was, there must have been grassland enough to permit of pastoral habits, modified, perhaps, by some hunting on the one hand, and by some primitive agriculture on the other. The Mediterranean men, coming from North Africa, an excellent country for the horse, may have vied with the Asiatics of the steppes in introducing a varied culture to the north. At any rate, when the Germans of Tacitus emerge into the light of history, they are not mere foresters, but rather woodlanders, men of the glades, with many sides to their life; including an acquaintance with the sea and its ways, surpassing by far that of those early beachcombers whose miserable kitchen-middens are to be found along the 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 called their attention to the crowds of people assembled to welcome them at the harbour. "Ah," said the elder and more thoughtful of the pair, "if they were only reindeer!" When domesticated, the reindeer yields milk as well as food, though large numbers are needed to keep the community in comfort. Otherwise hunting and fishing must serve to eke out the larder. Miserable indeed are the tribes or rather remnants of tribes along the Siberian tundra who have no reindeer. On the other hand, if there are plenty of wild reindeer, as amongst the Koryaks and 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 the Eskimo live, being strictly continuous with the Asiatic zone. Though having a very different fauna and flora, South America presumably forms part 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 the American Indian, the great moulding forces, geographical or other, must be merely guessed at. Much turns on the period assigned to the first appearance of man in this region; for that he is indigenous is highly improbable, if only because no anthropoid apes are found here. The racial type, which, with the exception of the Eskimo, and possibly of the salmon-fishing tribes along the north-west coast, is one for the whole continent, has a rather distant resemblance to that of the Asiatic Mongols. Nor is there any difficulty in finding the immigrants a means of transit from northern Asia. Even if it be held that the land-bridge by way of what are now the Aleutian Islands was closed at too early a date for man to profit by it, there is always the passage over 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 this point geography can at present tell us little. M. Demolins, it is true, describes three routes, one along the Rockies, the next down the central zone of prairies, and the third and most easterly by way of the great lakes. But this is pure hypothesis. No facts are adduced. Indeed, evidence bearing on distribution is very hard to obtain in this area, since the physical type is so uniform throughout. The best available criterion is the somewhat poor one of the distribution of the very various languages. Some curious lines of migration are indicated by the occurrence of the same type of language in widely separated regions, the most striking example being the appearance of one linguistic stock, the so-called Athapascan, away up in the north-west by the Alaska boundary; at one or two points in south-western Oregon and north-western California, where an absolute medley of languages prevails; and again in the southern highlands along the line of Colorado and Utah to the other side of the Mexican frontier. Does it follow from this distribution that the Apaches, at the southern end of the range, have come down from Alaska, by way of the Rockies and the Pacific slope, to their present habitat? It might be so in this particular case; but there are also those who think that the signs in general point to a northward dispersal of tribes, who before had been driven south by a period of glaciation. Thus the first thing to be settled is the antiquity of the American type of man.

A glance at South America must suffice. Geographically it consists of three regions. Westwards we have the Pacific line of bracing highlands, running down from Mexico as far as Chile, the home of two or more cultures of a rather high order. Then to the east there is the steaming equatorial forest, first covering a fan of rivers, then rising up into healthier hill-country, the whole in its wild state hampering to human enterprise. And below it occurs the grassland of the pampas, only needing the horse to bring out the powers of its native occupants.

Before leaving this subject of the domesticated horse, of which so much use has already been made in order to illustrate how geographic opportunity and human contrivance must help each other out, it is worth noticing how an invention can quickly revolutionize even that cultural life of the ruder races which is usually supposed to be quite hide-bound by immemorial custom. When the Europeans first broke in upon the redskins of North America, they found them a people of hunters and fishers, it is true, but with agriculture as a second string everywhere east of the Mississippi as well as to the south, and on the whole sedentary, with villages scattered far apart; so that in pre-Conquest days they would seem to have been enjoying a large measure of security and peace. The coming of the whites soon crowded them back upon themselves, disarranging the old boundaries. At the same time the horse and the gun were introduced. With extraordinary rapidity the Indian adapted himself to a new mode of existence, a grassland life, complicated by the fact that the relentless pressure of the invaders gave it a predatory turn which it might otherwise have lacked. Something very similar, though neither conditions nor consequences were quite the same, occurred in the pampas of South America, where horse-Indians like the Patagonians, who seem at first sight the indigenous outcrop of the very soil, are really the recent by-product of an intrusive culture.

* * * * *

And now let us hark back to southern Asia with its two reservoirs of life, India and China, and between them a jutting promontory pointing the way to the Indonesian archipelago, and thence onward farther still to the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad lands ranging in size from a continent to a coral-atoll. Here we have a nursery of seamen on a vaster scale than in the Mediterranean; for remember that from this point man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter Island in the Eastern Pacific right away to Madagascar, where we find Javanese immigrants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, whilst the language is of a Malayo-Polynesian type.

India and China each well-nigh deserve the status of geographical provinces on their own account. Each is an area of settlement; and, once there is settlement, there is a cultural influence which co-operates with the environment to weed out immigrant forms; as we see, for example, in Egypt, where a characteristic physical type, or rather pair of types, a coarser and a finer, has apparently persisted, despite the constant influx of other races, from the dawn of its long history. India, however, and China have both suffered so much invasion from the Eurasian northland, and at the same time are of such great extent and comprise such diverse physical conditions, that they have, in the course of the long years, sent forth very various broods of men to seek their fortunes in the south-east.

Nor must we ignore the possibility of an earlier movement in the opposite direction. In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon, not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place the original home of the human race. It will be wise to touch lightly on matters involving considerations of palaeo-geography, that most kaleidoscopic of studies. The submerged continents which it calls from the vasty deep have a habit of crumbling away again. Let us therefore refrain from providing man with land-bridges (draw-bridges, they might almost be called), whether between the Indonesian islands; or between New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania; or between Indonesia and Africa by way of the Indian Ocean. Let the curious facts about the present distribution of the racial types speak for themselves, the difficulties about identifying a racial type being in the meantime ever borne in mind.

Most striking of all is the diffusion of the Negro stocks with black skin and woolly hair. Their range is certainly suggestive of a breeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia. To the extreme west are the negroes of Africa, to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuans and Melanesians) extending from New Guinea through the oceanic islands as far as Fiji. A series of connecting links is afforded by the small negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not known how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in an occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groups of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocks in South Africa. Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay Peninsula, the Aket of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of Java, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of human beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, if we turn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other day inhabited 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 is impossible to say. It is not even certain, though highly probable, that man originated in one spot. If he did, he must have been hereditarily endowed, almost from the outset, with an adaptability to different climates quite unique in its way. The tiger is able to range from the hot Indian jungle to the freezing Siberian tundra; but man is the cosmopolitan animal beyond all others. Somehow, on this theory of a single origin, he made his way to every quarter of the globe; and when he got there, though needing time, perhaps, to acquire the local colour, managed in the end to be at home. It looks as if both race and a dash of culture had a good deal to do with his exploitation of geographical opportunity. How did the Australians and their Negrito forerunners invade their Austral world, at some period which, we cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in time? Certain at least it is that they crossed a formidable barrier. What is known as Wallace's line corresponds with the deep channel running between the islands of Bali and Lombok and continuing northwards to the west of Celebes. On the eastern side the fauna are non-Asiatic. Yet somehow into Australia with its queer monotremes and marsupials entered triumphant man—man and the dog with him. Haeckel has suggested that man followed the dog, playing as it were the jackal to him. But this sounds rather absurd. It looks as if man had already acquired enough seamanship to ferry himself across the zoological divide, and to take his faithful dog with him on board his raft or dug-out. Until we have facts whereon to build, however, it would be as unpardonable to lay down the law on these matters as it is permissible to fill up the blank by guesswork.

It remains to round off our original survey by a word or two more about the farther extremities, west, south, and east, of this vast southern world, to which south-eastern Asia furnishes a natural approach. The negroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa south of the Sahara, all to themselves. In and near the equatorial forest-region of the west the pure type prevails, displaying agricultural pursuits such as the cultivation of the banana, and, farther north, of millet, that must have been acquired before the race was driven out of the more open country. Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with intrusive pastoral peoples of the Mediterranean type, the negro blood, however, tending to predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and similar stocks to the west along the grassland bordering on the desert; the Nilotic folk amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and throughout the eastern and southern parkland the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept the Bushmen and the kindred Hottentots before them down into the desert country in the extreme south-west. It may be added that Africa has a rich fauna and flora, much mineral wealth, and a physical configuration that, in respect to its interior, though not to its coasts, is highly diversified; so that it may be doubted whether the natives have reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture as the resources of the environment, considered by itself, might seem to warrant. If the use of iron was invented in Africa, as some believe, it would only be another proof that opportunity is nothing apart from the capacity to grasp it.

Of the Australian aborigines something has been said already. Apart from the Negrito or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually held to belong to that pre-Dravidian stock represented by various jungle tribes in southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, connecting links between the two areas being the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and East Sumatra, and the Toala of Celebes. It may be worth observing, also, that pre-historic skulls of the Neanderthal type find their nearest parallels in modern Australia. We are here in the presence of some very ancient dispersal, from what centre and in what direction it is hard to imagine. In Australia these early colonists found pleasant, if somewhat lightly furnished, lodgings. In particular there were no dangerous beasts; so that hunting was hardly calculated to put a man on his mettle, as in more exacting climes. Isolation, and the consequent absence of pressure from human intruders, is another fact in the situation. Whatever the causes, the net result was that, despite a very fair environment, away from the desert regions of the interior, man on the whole stagnated. In regard to material comforts and conveniences, the rudeness of their life seems to us appalling. On the other hand, now that we are coming to know something of the inner life and mental history of the Australians, a somewhat different complexion is put upon the state of their culture. With very plain living went something that approached to high thinking; and we must recognize in this case, as in others, what might be termed a differential evolution of culture, according to which some elements may advance, whilst others stand still, or even decay.

To another and a very different people, namely, the Polynesians, the same notion of a differential evolution may be profitably applied. They were in the stone-age when first discovered, and had no bows and arrows. On the other hand, with coco-nut, bananas and bread-fruit, they had abundant means of sustenance, and were thoroughly at home in their magnificent canoes. Thus their island-life was rich in ease and variety; and, whilst rude in certain respects, they were almost civilized in others. Their racial affinities are somewhat complex. What is almost certain is that they only occupied the Eastern Pacific during the course of the last 1500 years or so. They probably came from Indonesia, mixing to a slight extent with Melanesians on their way. How the proto-Polynesians came into existence in Indonesia is more problematic. Possibly they were the result of a mixture between long-headed immigrants from eastern India, and round-headed Mongols from Indo-China and the rest of south-eastern Asia, from whom the present Malays are derived.

* * * * *

We have completed our very rapid regional survey of the world; and what do we find? By no means is it case after case of one region corresponding to one type of man and to one type of culture. It might be that, given persistent physical conditions of a uniform kind, and complete isolation, human life would in the end conform to these conditions, or in other words stagnate. No one can tell, and no one wants to know, because as a matter of fact no such environmental conditions occur in this world of ours. Human history reveals itself as a bewildering series of interpenetrations. What excites these movements? Geographical causes, say the theorists of one idea. No doubt man moves forward partly because nature kicks him behind. But in the first place some types of animal life go forward under pressure from nature, whilst others lie down and die. In the second place man has an accumulative faculty, a social memory, whereby he is able to carry on to the conquest of a new environment whatever has served him in the old. But this is as it were to compound environments—a process that ends by making the environment coextensive with the world. Intelligent assimilation of the new by means of the old breaks down the provincial barriers one by one, until man, the cosmopolitan animal by reason of his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmopolitan culture; at first almost unconsciously, but later on with self-conscious intent, because he is no longer content to live, but insists on living well.

As a sequel to this brief examination of the geographic control considered by itself it would be interesting, if space allowed, to append a study of the distribution of the arts and crafts of a more obviously economic and utilitarian type. If the physical environment were all in all, we ought to find the same conditions evoking the same industrial appliances everywhere, without the aid of suggestions from other quarters. Indeed, so little do we know about the conditions attending the discovery of the arts of life that gave humanity its all-important start—the making of fire, the taming of animals, the sowing of plants, and so on—that it is only too easy to misread our map. We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course of 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, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt if, on the whole, history tends to repeat itself in the case of the great useful inventions. We are all of us born imitators, but inventive genius 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 John Evans finds "so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands." And throughout the palaeolithic age in Europe the very limited number and regular succession of forms testifies to the innate conservatism of man, and the slow progress of invention. And yet, as some American writers have argued—who do not find that the distinction between chipped palaeoliths and polished neoliths of an altogether later age applies equally well to the New World—it was just as easy to have got an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact remains that in the Old World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather than another, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strike out a new line. There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, but it 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 the utilization of natural products, but of a downright oddity, something that might easily be invented once only and almost immediately dropped again. And yet here it is all over the world, going back, we may conjecture, to very ancient times, and implying interpenetrations of bygone peoples, of whose wanderings perhaps we may never unfold the secret. It is called the "bull-roarer," and is simply a slat of wood on the end of a string, which when whirled round produces a rather unearthly humming sound. Will the anthropo-geographer, after studying the distribution of wood and stringy substances round the globe, venture to prophesy that, if man lived his half a million years or so over again, the bull-roarer would be found spread about very much where it is to-day? "Bull-roarer" is just one of our local names for what survives now-a-days as a toy in many an old-fashioned corner of the British Isles, where it is also known as boomer, buzzer, whizzer, swish, and so on. Without going farther afield we can get a hint of the two main functions which it seems to have fulfilled amongst ruder peoples. 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 of his own making, with the result that the beasts were soon running frantically towards the byre. On the other hand, it is sometimes regarded there as a "thunner-spell," a charm against thunder, the superstition being that like cures like, and whatever makes a noise like 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 once that here and there, in Galicia in Europe, in the Malay Peninsula in Asia, and amongst the Bushmen in Africa, it is used to drive or scare animals, whether tame or wild. And this, to make a mere guess, may have been its earliest use, if utilitarian contrivances can generally claim historical precedence, as is by no means certain. As long as man hunted with very inferior weapons, he must have depended a good deal on drives, that either forced the game into a pitfall, or rounded them up so as to enable a concerted attack to be made by the human pack. No wonder that the bull-roarer is sometimes used to bring luck in a mystic way to hunters. More commonly, however, at the present day, the bull-roarer serves another type of mystic purpose, its noise, which is so suggestive of thunder or wind, with a superadded touch of weirdness and general mystery, fitting it to play a leading part in rain-making ceremonies. From these not improbably have developed all sorts of other ceremonies connected with making vegetation and the crops grow, and with making the boys grow into men, as is done at the initiation rites. It is not surprising, therefore, to find a carved human face appearing on the bull-roarer in New Guinea, and again away in North America, whilst in West Africa it is held to contain the voice of a very god. In Australia, too, all their higher notions about a benevolent deity and about religious matters in general seem to concentrate on this strange symbol, outwardly the frailest of toys, yet to the spiritual eye of these simple folk a veritable holy of holies.

And now for the merest sketch of its distribution, the details of which are to be learnt from Dr. Haddon's valuable paper in The Study of Man. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have it. It can be tracked along central Europe through Switzerland, Germany, and Poland beyond the Carpathians, whereupon ancient Greece with its Dionysiac mysteries takes up the tale. In America it is found amongst the Eskimo, is scattered over the northern part of the continent down to the Mexican frontier, and then turns up afresh in central Brazil. Again, from the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra it extends over the great fan of darker peoples, from Africa, west and south, to New Guinea, Melanesia, and Australia, together with New Zealand alone of Polynesian islands—a fact possibly showing it to have belonged to some earlier race of colonists. Thus in all of the great geographical areas the bull-roarer is found, and that without reckoning in analogous implements like the so-called "buzz," which cover further ground, for instance, the eastern coastlands of Asia. Are we to postulate many independent origins, or else far-reaching transportations by migratory peoples, by the American Indians and the negroes, for example? No attempt can be made here to answer these questions. It is enough to have shown by the use of a single illustration how the study of the geographical distribution of inventions raises as many difficulties as it solves.

Our conclusion, then, must be that the anthropologist, whilst constantly consulting his physical map of the world, must not suppose that by so doing he will be saved all further trouble. Geographical facts represent a passive condition, which life, something by its very nature active, obeys, yet in obeying conquers. We cannot get away from the fact that we are physically determined. Yet, physical determinations have been surmounted by human nature in a way to which the rest of the animal world affords no parallel. Thus man, as the old saying has it, makes love all the year round. Seasonal changes of course affect him, yet he is no slave of the seasons. And so it is with the many other elements involved in the "geographic control." The "road," for instance—that is to say, any natural avenue of migration or communication, whether by land over bridges and through passes, or by sea between harbours and with trade-winds to swell the sails—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-machine may be your pair of legs, or a horse, or a boat, or a railway, or an airship. Let us be moderate in all things, then, even in our references to the force of circumstances. Circumstances can unmake; but of themselves they never yet made man, nor any other form of life.



CHAPTER V LANGUAGE

The differentia of man—the quality that marks him off from the other animal kinds—is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech. Thereby his mind itself becomes articulate. If language is ultimately a creation of the intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is the intellect a creation of language. As flesh depends on bone, so does the living tissue of our spiritual life depend on its supporting framework of steadfast verbal forms. The genius, the heaven-born benefactor of humanity, is essentially he who wrestles with "thoughts too deep for words," until at last he assimilates them to the scheme of meanings embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus raises them definitely above the threshold of the common consciousness, which is likewise the threshold of the common culture.

There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on language to an account of those factors in the life of man that together stand on the whole for the principle of freedom—of rational self-direction. Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the range of our control. As they are viewed from the standpoint of human history as a whole, they show each in its own fashion a certain capacity to meet the needs and purposes of the life-force halfway. Regarded abstractly, however, they may conveniently be treated as purely passive and limiting conditions. Here we are with a constitution not of our choosing, and in a world not of our choosing. Given this inheritance, and this environment, how are we, by taking thought and taking risks, to achieve the best-under-the-circumstances? Such is the vital problem as it presents itself to any particular generation of men.

The environment is as it were the enemy. We are out to conquer and enslave it. Our inheritance, on the other hand, is the impelling force we obey in setting forth to fight; it tingles in our blood, and nerves the muscles of our arm. This force of heredity, however, abstractly considered, is blind. Yet, corporately and individually, we fight with eyes that see. This supervening faculty, then, of utilizing the light of experience represents a third element in the situation; and, from the standpoint of man's desire to know himself, the supreme element. The environment, inasmuch as under this conception are included all other forms of life except man, can muster on its side a certain amount of intelligence of a low order. But man's prerogative is to dominate his world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defied the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, homo sapiens. In his way he thought, even in those far-off days. And therefore we may assume, until direct evidence is forthcoming to the contrary, that he likewise had language of an articulate kind. He tried to make a speech, we may almost say, as soon as he had learned to stand up on his hind legs.

Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the history of human speech to its first beginnings. In the latter half of the last 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 sounds of the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of the type of tut-tut. Or, again, as was natural in Europe, where, with the exception of Basque in a corner of the west, and of certain Asiatic languages, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, all spoken tongues present certain obvious affinities, the comparative philologist undertook to construct sundry great families of speech; and it was hoped that sooner or later, by working back to some linguistic parting of the ways, the central problem would be solved of the dispersal of the world's races.

These painted bubbles have burst. The further examination of the forms of speech current amongst peoples of rude culture has not revealed a conspicuous wealth either of imitative or of interjectional sounds. On the other hand, the comparative study of the European, or, as they must be termed in virtue of the branch stretching through Persia into India, the Indo-European stock of languages, carries us back three or four thousand years at most—a mere nothing in terms of anthropological time. Moreover, a more extended search through the world, which in many of its less cultured parts furnishes no literary remains that may serve to illustrate linguistic evolution, shows endless diversity of tongues in place of the hoped-for system of a few families; so that half a hundred apparently independent types must be distinguished in North America alone. For the rest, it has become increasingly clear that race and language need not go together at all. What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had no history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still surviving Basque; though it is not in the least necessary, therefore, to suppose that the Celtic-speaking invaders wiped out the previous inhabitants of the land to a corresponding extent. Races, in short, mix readily; languages, except in very special circumstances, hardly at all.

Disappointed in its hope of presiding over the reconstruction of the distant past of man, the study of language has in recent years tended somewhat to renounce the historical—that is to say, anthropological—method altogether. The alternative is a purely formal treatment of the subject. Thus, whereas vocabularies seem hopelessly divergent in their special contents, the general apparatus of vocal expression is broadly the same everywhere. That all men alike communicate by talking, other symbols and codes into which thoughts can be translated, such as gestures, the various kinds of writing, drum-taps, smoke signals, and so on, being in the main but secondary and derivative, is a fact of which the very universality may easily blind us to its profound significance. Meanwhile, the science of phonetics—having lost that "guid conceit of itself" which once led it to discuss at large whether the art of talking evolved at a single geographical centre, or at many centres owing to similar capacities of body and mind—contents itself now-a-days for the most part with conducting an analytic survey of the modes of vocal expression as correlated with the observed tendencies of the human speech-organs. And what is true of phonetics in particular is hardly less true of comparative philology as a whole. Its present procedure is in the main analytic or formal. Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply by contrasting the different ways in which words are affected by being put together into a sentence. No attempt is made to show that one type of arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is in any way more rudimentary—that is to say, less adapted to the needs of human intercourse. It is not even pretended that a given language is bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; though the process known as analogy—that is, the regularizing of exceptions by treating the unlike as if it were like—will always be apt to establish one system at the expense of the rest.

If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminence amongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction must be given to its inquiries. And there is much to be said for any change that would bring about this result. Without constant help from the philologist, anthropology is bound to languish. To thoroughly understand the speech of the people under investigation is the field-worker's master-key; so much so, that the critic's first question in determining the value of an ethnographical work must always be, 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 for general principles can impart to any branch of science? To relieve the hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must be present a sense of wider issues involved, and such issues as may directly interest a student devoted to language for its own sake. The formal method of investigating language, in the meantime, can hardly supply the needed spur. Analysis is all very well so long as its ultimate purpose is to subserve genesis—that is to say, evolutionary history. If, however, it tries to set up on its own account, it is in danger of degenerating into sheer futility. Out of time and history is, in the long run, out of meaning and use. The philologist, then, if he is to help anthropology, must himself be an anthropologist, with a full appreciation of the importance of the historical method. He must be able to set each language or group of languages that he studies in its historical setting. He must seek to show how it has evolved in relation to the needs of a given time. In short, he must correlate words with thoughts; must treat language as a function of the social life.

* * * * *

Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most general characterization of primitive language as it throws light on the workings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subject is highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most types of savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third and most far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, are not speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits of mind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from another stock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus it is at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the more rudimentary with the more advanced methods that mankind employs for the purpose of putting its experience into words. Happily the careful attention devoted by American philologists to the aboriginal languages of their continent has resulted in the discovery of certain principles which the rest of our evidence, so far as it goes, would seem to stamp as of world-wide application. The reader is advised to study the most stimulating, if perhaps somewhat speculative, pages on language in the second volume of E.J. Payne's History of the New World called America; or, if he can wrestle with the French tongue, to compare the conclusions here reached with those to which Professor Levy-Bruhl is led, largely by the consideration of this same American group of languages, in his recent work, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societes Inferieures ("Mental Functions in the Lower Societies").

If the average man who had not looked into the matter at all were asked to say what sort of language he imagined a savage to have, he would be pretty sure to reply that in the first place the vocabulary would be very small, and in the second place that it would consist of very short, 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, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing 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, and two more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing four syllables and having no element in common. Sounds, in fact, are with them as copious as ideas are rare. Impressions, on the other hand, are, of course, infinite in number. By means of more or less significant sounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhat imperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currency of true thought.

For instance, I-cut-bear's-leg-at-the-joint-with-a-flint-now corresponds fairly well with the total impression produced by the particular act; though, even so, I have doubtless selectively reduced the notion to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a lot 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 of sounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteau word—"holophrase" is the technical name for it—into which is packed away enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail, the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, the time of the cutting, and who knows what besides. Amusing examples of such portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books. To go back to the Fuegians, their expression mamihlapinatapai is said to mean "to look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do." Now, since exactly the same situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partly different, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hit off in each case the whole outstanding impression that a given situation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would never recur either; one could never open one's mouth without coining a new word. Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downward limit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very far removed. Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character in twenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitive utterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeated use in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein they register 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 been a common word for "water," awen, which, moreover, is somehow suggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of these longer forms. In many other cases the difficulty of isolating the common meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too much altogether for a primitive language. You can express twenty different kinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say "cut" at all. No wonder that a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, "my father," "thy father," "his-or-her-father," are separate polysyllables without any element in common.

The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as a movement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction of the analytic. When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks can be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally, words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in such a 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 of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that tends towards wordlessness—that is to say, is relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordless thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance, that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe of meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody.

It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrate at all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, of primitive modes of speech. Person, number, case, tense, mood and gender—all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology of the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the very body of the words of which they qualify the sense. But the meagre list of determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language can yield one no idea of the vast medley of complicated forms that serve the same ends at the lower levels of human experience. Moreover, there are many other shades of secondary and circumstantial meaning which in advanced languages are invariably represented by distinct words, so that when not wanted they can be left out, but in a more primitive tongue are apt to run right through the very grammar of the sentence, thus mixing themselves up inextricably with the really substantial elements in the thought to be conveyed. For instance, in some American languages, things are either animate or inanimate, and must be distinguished accordingly by accompanying particles. Or, again, they are classed by similar means as rational or irrational; women, by the bye, being designated amongst the Chiquitos by the irrational sign. Reverential particles, again, are used to distinguish what is high or low in the tribal estimation; and we get in this connection such oddities as the Tamil practice of restricting the privilege of having a plural to high-caste names, such as those applied to gods and human beings, 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 to non-transferable possessions such as "my-hand"; "my-child," be it observed, falling within the latter class.

Most interesting of all are distinctions of person. These cannot but bite into the forms of speech, since the native mind is taken up mostly with the personal aspect of things, attaining to the conception of a bloodless system of "its" with the greatest difficulty, if at all. Even the third person, which is naturally the most colourless, because excluded from a direct part of the conversational game, undergoes multitudinous leavening in the light of conditions which the primitive mind regards as highly important, whereas we should banish them from our thoughts as so much irrelevant "accident." Thus the Abipones in the first place distinguished "he-present," eneha, and "she-present," anaha, from "he-absent" and "she-absent." But presence 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 lying down, 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 set of words was needed, "he-sitting (alone)" becoming ynitara, and so forth. The modest requirements of Fuegian intercourse have called more than twenty such separate pronouns into being.

Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed best. Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we" precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us," or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only." Hence, we are told, a missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use the inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned," lest the congregation assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must use 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 selective form is used only in special cases. Thus if the question be "Who will help?" 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 seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind.