1896.] 411 [Cushiug. 



preserved to lis — be studied in many ways witli unusually satisfactory 

 results. 



Another feature of these collections, of equal, if not of greater inter- 

 est, is the fact that they represent a Shell Age phase of human develop- 

 ment and culture. Their art is not only an art of the sea, but it is an art 

 of shells and teeth, an art for which the sea supplied nearly all the 

 working parts of tools, the land only some of the materials worked upon. 

 A study of these tools of shell and teeth furnishes us with an instruc- 

 tive lesson as to the ingenuity of primitive man, as to his capability of 

 meeting needs with help of what would at first seem to be impossible, 

 or but very indifterent, means ; and as to the eftect of this on derived art 

 in general. The lesson is suggestive. It would seem to indicate that 

 not here alone, or in those more extended regions of subtropic and 

 tropic America which I have mentioned as possibly the homes of like 

 key-dwelling peoples, but that in many further parts of the world — of 

 the Old World as well as of the New World — such a phase of develop- 

 ment may well have been passed through by whole peoples who 

 later became stone-using peoples ; yet whose earlier art of the sea had 

 in like manner influenced the art of their later conditions, of their 

 inland descendants and those who came into continual contact with them 

 — just as this art seems to have influenced that of the mound builders 

 and as a similar art — possessing no less striking marks of the sea, seems 

 to have influenced early men in southern and eastern Asia — like tlie 

 aboriginal Siamese and Cambodians, Coreans, Chinese and Japa- 

 nese. Nearer parallels yet, may be found among living peoples, as 

 before stated, those of Borneo and Papua and other parts of the Eastern 

 Archipelago, of the Caroline Islands and other parts of Polynesia. The 

 further question is therefore suggested — whether perhaps, in some por- 

 tions of the world (man having in all probability made the very begin- 

 ning of his development as a tool-maker upon the food-abounding sea- 

 shore of some tropic land) whether in the phase of life here exemplified 

 among the keys, we may not (despite its far higher development), find 

 some intimation of the remotest of human beginnings in the use of tools 

 and weapons as made of sea-produced and other organic materials. At 

 any rate, since returning from Florida and studying such sea-land remains 

 as I could find in various museums, and in one case studying them in the 

 actual field (on the coast of Maine, this last summer), I have found that 

 teeth and shells, wherever suitable kinds of these natural tools of the 

 animals themselves could be secured, have played a far more important 

 part, even in the arts of peoples who had abundance of excellent material 

 for stone implements at hand, than has hitherto been realized. 



There is no subject in the range of anthropological study, and this 

 especially applies to the study of prehistoric anthropology, which can 

 take rank above the subject of ethnographic origins. By this I mean, 

 for the moment, neither the relations, nor the migrations of peoples, pri- 

 marily, but the study of peculiar arts, institutions, and other cultural 



PROC. AMER. THILOS. SOC. XXXV. 153. 2 Z. PRINTED AUGUST 9, 1897. 



