392 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
expression is not complete. The thrifty, highly literate, self-disci- 
plined Danes not only take excellent care of the resources they have 
but make an effort to stabilize their population. In other words the 
third factor, culture, is involved, too. We express this relationship 
by using the symbol for function, or relationship, thus: 
TAC) 
This of course can be read forward or backward, for the f represents 
interrelation. Doubtless in primitive society R was the big thing, 
shaping culture and ruthlessly controlling population. With simple 
arts man is highly dependent on the kind and amount of readily 
available resources about him. But as culture advances new resources 
and new methods of using them develop, while population adjusts 
itself—or fails to do so—by virtue of cultural attitudes and practices. 
Then in turn the culture responds and the ways in which it does so 
would offer an intriguing approach to the study of man’s history. As 
the fraction R/P increases, to what extent is this reflected in wealth, 
leisure, creative work, and the good life? As it decreases, to what 
extent do we have poverty, social injustice, abuse of power and human 
disintegration? Such a study would not be easy. One would have to 
avoid oversimplification and the tendency to judge other cultures in 
terms of his own. He would confront the problem of rugged and 
infertile Scotland with its perennial contributions of human great- 
ness as well as that of the fair Pacific isles where the necessities of 
life are more generously offered and where one may echo the words 
“Happy the land that has no history !” 
Yet he would have to scratch deep in both instances to get at the 
truth. In doing so he would certainly see that some elements of 
Scotch character are based upon self-discipline in relation to meager 
resources. He would find that strict monogamy, combined with 
the control of male numbers by clan warfare and later by emigration, 
had afforded some measure of cultural control of population. 
Among the less austere Polynesians he would find evidence of gen- 
uine, if unrecorded, human greatness of a different order, and plenty 
of concern with resources and population. The daily business of 
getting food from the sea was not for weaklings. Even less was the 
making and manning of great canoes that evidently put off from 
time to time on long voyages that in the end peopled all the distant 
habitable islands. And there is a persistent belief that the people 
of the Pacific had some means of regulating population pressures 
other than abortion, infanticide, cannibalism, and warfare. At any 
rate, they developed a way of life that worked and was good enough 
for us to envy even as we were trying to change it. How else can 
we describe our efforts to get them to switch from grass skirts to 
