546 ETHNOLOGY 



man's ancestral form must indeed have been sadly inferior, if it 

 had not gained through play a mass of valuable results, which 

 man inherited as no mean capital. The same author's Play of Man 

 adds emphasis to this view, though neither book was written to 

 establish the point which we are making. Mr. Atkinson's Primal 

 Law is a remarkable book, full of suggestion. We need not accept 

 all of its conclusions, but his general argument is startlingly use- 

 ful. Why should we seek the origin of certain curious features 

 of social organization in humanity, when their very nature sug- 

 gests a source in the brute ancestors? Mr. Atkinson has pointed 

 us wisely, even though he may not have established all his con- 

 clusions. What is true in regard to the play-impulse with its valu- 

 able results and in regard to early sociological taboos, must be 

 true of many other fields of human activity. The beginnings are to 

 be sought and studied, not in the primitive man, but in the brute 

 ancestors. If this assumption is granted, what added importance 

 the subject of animal psychology assumes for the ethnologist and 

 how particularly important the little-investigated psychology of 

 the simian forms becomes! We ought to know just what achieve- 

 ments these nearest of our animal relatives have made, their 

 emotions, impulses, ideas, devices, inventions, institutions. Not, 

 of course, that such a knowledge, even if complete, will give us 

 an accurate or an adequate idea of what man owes to his predeces- 

 sors. These living simian forms are not in our ancestral line. It 

 is because they differed from our actual ancestors that they differ 

 from us to-day. But their psychology and their life will give us 

 a nearer conception of primitive man's inheritance from prehuman- 

 ity than we can otherwise gain. 



Second. Another point which seems worthy of attention is the 

 close relation of human types to local faunas and floras. This was 

 first brought strongly home to me by the accidental observation 

 that the area of the extended cultivation of maguey, the plant 

 from which the famous intoxicant pulque is derived, and the 

 area of the atomis in Mexico practically coincides. Maps have not 

 been prepared to demonstrate this coincidence, but I believe they 

 would show it to exist. This impression was strengthened by an 

 examination of Professor Seth E. Meek's map of the distribution of 

 fresh-water fishes in Mexico. Here, again, time has not permitted 

 that careful and rigid comparison which alone would warrant a 

 final statement, but the areas of fish faunas appear fairly to coin- 

 cide with the areas of human linguistic groups. In this connection 

 we may refer to a recent paper by C. Hart Merriam, in Science 

 of June 17, 1904, Distribution of Indian Tribes in the Southern 

 Sierra and adjacent parts of the San Joaquin Valley, California. 

 In this paper, without actually making any statement just such 



