452 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 2 



on ; and though not individually immortal, like body cells, they are so 

 in bulk, and in effect. 



It is this multicellular social organism " — or rather the species to 

 which it belongs — that, during its phase of existence, passes through 

 those stages "which Sir Flinders Petrie has described. We may speak 

 of this unit as a culture, a civilization, a community, or (metaphori- 

 cally) as an organism. These, however, are abstractions. What Ave 

 are dealing with in reality is a unit or individual in four dimensions. 

 The community — such as a city state, for instance — has a geographical 

 extension in three dimensions and a temporal one in the fourth. Its 

 full content is, let us say, 200 square miles X 500 years.^° This is per- 

 fectly plain when we are dealing with a multicellular organism like 

 a human being, whose biography can be written. Civilization, when 

 it first appears, represents life organizing itself again de novo at a 

 higher level of consciousness, taking as its unit or brick an intelligent 

 human being instead of an unintelligent cell. Obviously therefore our 

 inquiry into the origin and nature of a civilized community must 

 begin with an investigation of the origin and nature of this human be- 

 ing; just as the study of biology begins with the problem of the ori- 

 gin of the living cell from which all living things are descended. Tlie 

 biological problem is still unsolved, but there seems to be a funda- 

 mental difference — can it be merely one of organization? — between 

 living and dead matter. The birth of life marks the beginning of a 

 new chapter, though we can not find the page in the book of nature. 



So, too, there is an uncertainty about the precise moment when 

 Homo Sapiens emerged from Homo Insipiens, but everyone recog- 

 nizes the difference between, say, the most primitive savage and his 

 lemurian ancestor. Another new chapter has been begun. It may 

 be suggested that the essential change is from instinctive to intelli- 

 gent reaction, or, stated in other terms, from passive adaptation to 

 environment to active control of it. (This does not of course imply 

 that instinct and adaptation cease to function ; we know that they do ; 

 it is rather comparable with the fact that living matter retains 

 many of the properties of dead matter, along with the new ones 

 added.) Man as such comes first upon the stage when he becomes 

 a tool-making animal; that marks the beginning of chapter 2, 

 chapter 1 being the birth of life. 



* In the analogy we compare the life history of a human commuuity with the life his- 

 tory of a species. But we compare the organization of that community to the organiza- 

 tion (structure, function, etc.) of the individual muUicellular organism. The human 

 community recapitulates, as we shall see below, the life history, not of the individual 

 organism but of the species. But since the organism itself, as the species develops, re- 

 capitulates its own evolution, there is a general resemblance between the life history of 

 both organism and community. 



10 There is also, of course, a certain thickness, but for our present purpose this may 

 be ignored. 



