462 ANTHROPOLOGY 



the mental and moral beggars of the community, who may not be 

 trusted on horseback but only in the rear seat of the wagon. In 

 truth, standards are rising so rapidly that the lower half find it 

 hard to keep up. 



In one aspect the problem of the unregenerate is ever pressing, 

 since knowledge is not yet a birthright (save in the promising 

 germ of instinct) among human scions of lower ancestry; but 

 even in this aspect a progressive solution is wrought with ever- 

 increasing success through public education. The most serious 

 side of the problem arises in the immigration or upgrowth of the 

 unfit, who sometimes ferment in the unwholesome leaven of anarchy 

 before education has time for perfect work; and this danger cries 

 out for public action through the blood of both presidential and 

 monarchical martyrs to public duty. The morbid view imported by 

 Nordau and his ilk demands little American notice, however large 

 the problem in Europe; for under the stimulus of that personal 

 freedom which is the essence of enlightenment, normal exercise 

 of mind and body springs spontaneously, while hereditary disease, 

 constitutional taint, idiocy, unhealthy diathesis, and all manner of 

 transmissible abnormalities tend to wear themselves out, as our vital 

 statistics sufficiently show. 



These are a few of the present problems of anthropology in- 

 volved in classifications growing out of the dual nature of man- 

 kind the physical nature inherited from lowly ancestry, and the 

 mental nature (in all its protean aspects) built up through exer- 

 cise during uncounted generations of functional development. They 

 may seem irrelevant to that earlier anthropology which is content 

 to define mankind by skulls of the dead; but they illustrate the 

 living importance of that modern science which defines mankind 

 by actions and thoughts, movements and motives. 



Meaning of Activital Coincidences 



About 1875 archeologists, and after them students of primitive 

 folk still living, became impressed with certain similarities among 

 industrial and symbolic devices of remote regions. One of the 

 widespread devices is the arrow; used commonly with the bow, 

 sometimes with the atlatl, or thr owing-stick, and again as a dart 

 projected by the hand alone, it has been found on every continent 

 and in nearly every primitive tribe. Another is a quadrate or cruci- 

 form symbol; either in the form of a simple cross or in that of 

 the cross with supplementary arms known as the swastika or fyl- 

 fot, these symbols are common to Europe, Asia, Africa, both Amer- 

 icas, and numerous islands, though they have not been found in 

 Australasia. At the outset such devices were accepted as links in 



