572 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



materials better suited for the manufacture of implements and 

 weapons. But when we consider how slowly and laboriously primi- 

 tive man acquired new ideas, and how such ideas — even those which 

 seem childishly simple and obvious to us — were treasured as priceless 

 possessions and handed on from tribe to tribe, it becomes increasingly 

 difficult to believe in the possibiUty of the independent evolution of 

 similar customs and inventions of any degree of complexity. 



The hypothesis of the ''fundamental similarity of the working of 

 the human mind" is no more potent to explain the identity of cus- 

 toms in widely different parts of the world, the distribution of mega- 

 lithic monuments, or the first appearance of metals in America, 

 than it is to destroy our belief that one man, and one only, originally 

 conceived the idea of the mechanical use to which steam could be 

 appUed, or that the electric battery was not independently evolved 

 in each of the countries where it is now in use. 



In these discursive remarks I have attempted to deal with old 

 problems in the light of newly acquired evidence; to emphasize the 

 undoubted fact that the evolution of the primates and the emergence 

 of the distinctively human type of intelligence are to be explained 

 primarily by a steady growth and specialization of certain parts of 

 the brain; that such a development could have occurred only in the 

 mammalia, because they are the only plastic class of animals with a 

 true organ of intelUgence; that an arboreal mode of life started 

 man's ancestors on the way to preeminence, for it gave them the 

 agility; and the specialization of the higher parts of the brain inci- 

 dental to such a life gave them the seeing eye; and in course of time 

 also the understanding ear; and that all the rest followed in the 

 train of this high development of vision working on a brain which 

 controlled ever-increasingly agile limbs. 



If, in pursuing these objects, I may have seemed to wander far 

 from the beaten paths of anthropology, as it is usually understood 

 in this section, and perhaps encroached upon the domains of the 

 zoologial section, my aim has been to demonstrate that the solution 

 of these problems of human origins, which have frequently engaged 

 the attention of the anthropological section, is not to be sought 

 merely in comparisons of man and the anthropoid apes. Man has 

 emerged not by the sudden intrusion of some new element into the 

 ape's physical structure or the fabric of his mind, but by the culmina- 

 tion of those processes which have been operating in the same way 

 in a long line of ancestors ever since the beginning of the Tertiary 

 period. 



If I have made this general conception clear to you, however 

 clumsily I have marshaled the evidence and with whatever crudities 

 of psychological statement it may be marred, I shall feel that this 

 address has served some useful purpose. 



