ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH OUTSIDE AMERICA. 23 



to be determined how far elements of culture carried from one part of the 

 world to another tend to disappear or become modified, and what are the 

 causes which lead to this disappearance or modification. There has also 

 to be settled how far introduced influences can modify the native culture and 

 produce customs and institutions which were not present before the blending 

 of the two peoples, but only came into being as the result of their contact. 

 Here again the variety of an insular region and the greater isolation of its 

 constituent parts allow such i:)rocesses to be studied in a purer form than in 

 a continental area. 



Whether it be for these or some other reasons, it stands beyond question 

 that the culture of Oceania presents a variety, combined with a relative sim- 

 plicity of its various elements, which makes it a most suitable field for the 

 application of the process of ethnological analysis. It has attracted the atten- 

 tion of the leading adherents of the school which believes in the complexity 

 of human culture, and some of the chief attempts to study human culture 

 from this point of view have taken the peoples of Oceania as their starting- 

 point and have worked from that to other parts of the world. Such attempts 

 have hitherto been far from satisfactory, but that is inevitable with the exist- 

 ing defects in our knowledge. This defectiveness of existing knowledge in 

 a region the theoretical importance of which has been so widely recognized 

 furnishes a most cogent motive for the choice of this region as a field of work. 



There is yet another reason which should lead to the choice of this field 

 of work by an American institution. There is no part of the world where 

 the problem of simplicity or complexity of culture is of a more burning 

 and yet more difficult character than the American continents. It has 

 become almost an axiom among the majority of students of ethnology that 

 the culture existing in America before the advent of the early Spanish 

 navigators was of wholly indigenous growth, and that all the features are 

 to be accounted for as the results of a process of evolution starting from 

 some elementary form of human culture. It would take me beyond the 

 scope of this report to consider this matter fuUy, but I should like to deal 

 briefly with this subject in so far as it suggests openings for investigation. 

 The conclusion that the culture of the American continents has had a wholly 

 independent growth ignores certain features of human intercourse of which 

 even now we have some knowledge. History and ethnology combine in pro- 

 viding us with evidence that all the great movements in human progress are 

 the results of the contact and interaction of peoples and their cultures. All 

 the evidence goes to show that a culture left to itself suffers degeneration, and 

 that it is only the coming in of some new awakening influence which can save 

 it from the inevitable decay which isolation brings. Further, there is clear 

 evidence that such influence from without has been an essential factor in the 

 production of the special developments of American culture. There is no dis- 

 agreement about the foreign origin of the Incas, and immigrations of peoples 

 from elsewhere form an undoubted element in the beginnings of Mexican 



