THE ROVING IMPULSE 195 



It is interesting, we think, to inquire whether 

 there may not be two kinds of nomadism. It may 

 be that roving manifestations confined to early 

 childhood, or to adolescence, or associated with 

 marked lack of control and grip, are due to the 

 outcrop of an ancestral trait, while another form 

 expresses an independent variation, a new departure, 

 an organismal experiment in the direction of ex- 

 ploration and novelty-seeking. It is marked by 

 great power of control and by resolute resistance, 

 though it sways its possessors restlessly. Perhaps 

 many of the great explorers and naturalist-travelers 

 illustrate this type, men who cannot rest, as Nansen 

 once said, until they have gone through, or tried 

 to go through, every room even the ghost-room 

 of the vast house which is theirs. 



Dr. Davenport points to the restless habits of 

 the gorilla and the chimpanzee. The gorilla family 

 roams about in search of food, and will rarely 

 stay a couple of nights in the same shelter. We 

 read that the chimpanzee never uses its sleeping 

 platform a second night. Now it may be that the 

 group of animals to which the ancestors of man 

 belonged were typical nomads, but there seems great 

 risk of fallacy when nomadism in man is likened to 

 wandering that has a direct relation to food-getting 

 or to periodic environmental changes. The wander- 

 jng may have been initiated by variants akin to 

 roving boys in mankind, but the impulse has been 

 tamed and incorporated into the general inheri- 

 tance of the species in question, and may be ex-, 



