420 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



(Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, etc.) are synonymous with 

 pain and suffering, have corroborated such a view. Indeed, in English 

 one word is still applicable to the ' labor ' of women in child-birth, 

 of the peasant in the field and of the man of science in his laboratory 

 or in his study. According to Ferrero,* the habit of work is one of 

 the great acquisitions of civilized man, who has left his opinion of its 

 disagreeableness, not merely in words by which it is named, but also in 

 myths and legends scattered all over the globe, in which the necessity 

 to labor is represented (as in some of the Eden stories) as a result of the 

 sinfulness of the fathers of the race. Vierkandt,f in his recent study 

 of savagery and civilization, synthetizes these two stages of human 

 progress as ' play ' and ' organization ' respectively. Professor Karl 

 Bucher,J of Leipzig, who devotes one section of a very interesting and 

 suggestive book to the 'work methods of primitive peoples,' reviews 

 briefly the ' horror laboris ' theory, pointing out that the latest and most 

 trustworthy studies of savage and barbarous peoples indicate, beyond a 

 doubt, that a very large amount of work is performed by them, though 

 the impulses leading up to it are not the same as those which influence 

 the work of cultured races, the technical aids are very imperfect, the 

 work processes complicated, and a tendency to artistic elaboration and 

 adornment is marked among the uncivilized peoples. With Ferrero, 

 Biicher holds that the horror laboris could hardly have originated from 

 bodily fatigue, since many of the phenomena of activity among primi- 

 tive peoples, notably some of their dances, continue until utter weariness 

 and exhaustion end them. According to Bucher,§ it is aversion to 

 effort of the mind and will, not repugnance to bodily exertion and 

 fatigue, that causes the savage to dislike work. His dislike is of 

 psychic origin, and in such performances as the dance, which are car- 

 ried on to the point of exhaustion and fatigue he finds ' an easy means 

 of discharging, without destroying the condition of mental inertia so 

 characteristic of him, the accumulation of nerve-force in his intellectual 

 organs.' That this theory can be carried too far and that the dance 

 and cognate activities are not the only ones which the savage is capable 

 of carrying on in genius-fashion is evident from the researches of Boas 

 and other competent and thoroughgoing students of primitive man. 

 The most suggestive of all recent writings on this head is Dr. W J 

 McGee's|| account of the Seri Indians of Tiburon Island and the ad- 

 jacent Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California. These Indians are not 



* 'Les formes primitives du travail.' Rev. Scientif. (Paris), 1896, pp. 331- 

 335. See also: Les lois psychologiques du symbolisme (Paris, 1895), pp. 13, 24. 



t ' Naturvolker und Kulturvolker ' (Leipzig, 1896). 



I ' Arbeit und Rhytlimus.' 2te Aufl. (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 1-23. 



%' hoc. cit., p. 21. 



II Seventeenth Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. (Washington, 1898 [1901], pp. 

 1-128, 129*-344*. 



