MIGRATION AND THE FOOD QUEST. 537 



IX. — SIMILARITIES IN ARTS. 



To attempt iu a short address to elucidate the -svhole subject of simi- 

 larities in arts along the two shores would consume too much time.' 

 The speaker will sufficiently orient himself iu the minds of his readers 

 by saying- that there was scarcely an original fuudamental idea 

 developed ujion the Western Hempshire. Every one of the industrial 

 and aesthetic arts here can be matched by one from Asia or Oceanica. 

 The differences are varietal, regional, tribal, si)ecial, natural. Many 

 American arts also tally with those of prehistoric Europe, but these 

 also came from that common ancestral source that supplied both Europe 

 and Asia and America. 



There is nothing unnatural or improbable in the supposition that the 

 original migrants to a country should lay aside an art on the way and 

 pick it up again in succeeding generations. Tribal memories do not 

 die because demands cease or resources temporarily fail. This does not 

 controvert Tylor's proposition, that a people that has acquired an art 

 never loses it. I am now speaking of a stream of migration starting 

 out from the equator and i^assing northward out of one culture area 

 of mineral, vegetal, and animal supply, and of aerial, marine, and ter- 

 restrial conditions, and moving northward into and through a series of 

 different supplies and conditions as ftir as there is a motive, and then 

 repeating the process southward on another continent. This would 

 require centuries. In one region a peculiar exigency evokes the art of 

 Avorking in hard stone: in a series of regions beyond, the absence of 

 material, or of the proper tools, or of a demand for the product, inter- 

 rupts or converts this art into something else. By and by the descend- 

 ants of this people come upon new quarries, demands, and appliances. 

 The art or folklore breaks forth again iu such striking similarity to the 

 old as to raise the inquiry among ethnologists whether some unfortu- 

 nate castaway may not have been thrust ashore here and taught all the 

 people a foreign art. This is highly improbable. The naturalists have 

 no difficulty of accounting for such occurrences in nature, and they 

 call them atavism. Technical atavism, or the revival of an industry 

 that has lived in tradition,^ then may and does account for the recur- 

 rence of some ancient Asiatic arts in America and of the same art iu 

 America in regions wide apart. 



X. — THE WITNESS OP ARCHy^OLOGY. 



Archeology has begun to bear testimony upon these possible migra- 

 tions. Morse discovered shell heaps in Japan, and his researches 

 were followed up by Kanda upon the stone implements. The ancient 



' The author is preparing for publication an illustrated paper on the arts of the two 

 sides of the Pacific, iu which the matter will be minutely discussed. 



2 This is excellently illustrated by Rae, in Jour. Anthrop. lust., Loud., 1878, Vol. 

 VII, i)p. 130, 131, with reference to the Eskimo house. 



