450 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 32 



The new phase is conceived when the invader cells swarm in from 

 without. The social body gradually takes shape; the structural lines 

 form and become more and more complex. With maturity comes full 

 self -consciousness. With the approach of age the culture gradually 

 loses energy until at last it dies, generally to be reborn in the same 

 manner. These processes obey the laws of growth because they are 

 life processes. They can not be forced. Violent attempts to do so 

 generally fail (though sometimes they may be as necessary as a surgi- 

 cal operation). The way to stimulate growth is by means of edu- 

 cational propaganda. 



What emerges from all this, is, we think, a generalization of wide 

 and far-reaching importance, namely, that each phase of civilization 

 has a life of its own and may be regarded as if it were a species 

 composed of living creatures. The phase as a whole corresponds to 

 the life of the species as a whole; the units composing the phase at 

 any given moment of history (the human beings) correspond to the 

 individuals com})osing the species. Both come into existence and 

 pass through maturity to decline and extinction, to be replaced as a 

 rule by another phase or species issuing from it. The evolution of 

 culture is exactly parallel to the evolution of organic life as a whole. 



The idea is not of course new; but it has never, we think, been 

 effectively grafted on to the wave theory of civilization. One of its 

 most recent advocates, Sir Arthur Keith, goes so far as to say:^ 

 " The resemblance between the body physiological and the body 

 politic is more than an analogy ; it is a reality." 



The cultural community is the unit, and, to conserve the analogy, it 

 is a multicellular organism. But, in point of fact, multicellular or- 

 ganisms have evolved from a single cell, and if the analogy is a just 

 one, we should find that communities have done so too. History tells 

 us that they do. The unit of the multicellular organism is a single 

 cell ; the unit of the community is a single human being.* We may 

 take Homo Sapiens when he first appears as representing this unit, 

 before its incorporation into the first community, represented, in a 

 slightly advanced stage perhaps, by the city states of Sumer (Ur, 

 Kish, and so forth). The transition may have been relatively 

 abrupt, for we now know that, up to about 5000 or 4000 B. C, the 

 caves of Kurdistan were still inhabited by primitive stone-age indi- 

 viduals, as they had been for countless ages before. The latest relics 

 found in the top layers of these caves correspond exactly with the 



'Concerning Man's Origin (Putnam, 1928), quoted in a most suggestive article on can- 

 cer in ttie Britisli Medical Journal (October 5, 1929, p. 607), by W. Sampson Handley, 

 M. S., F. R. C. S. 



* Barth regarded the family rather than the individual as the unit. 



