36 MAN AN ADAPTIVE MECHANISM 



certain animals, colors and noises, and in sensations 

 of pain when we are cut or struck. No wonder that 

 the fear and respect aroused by the brute courage and 

 strength, which were acquired in the flesh-to-flesh 

 encounter, survive to-day in the savage's acceptance 

 of the brute as a social equal ; in the Veda religions ; in 

 the ceremonials of animal worship ; in some countries 

 in edicts against the slaughter of animals ; in the 

 ancient art which depicted man as half man, half 

 beast ; and in many other phases of ancient and modern 

 civilization. The sense of the close relationship of 

 man to the brute world is the essence of Totemism, 

 that peculiar system of superstition by which the Alas- 

 kan Indian proclaims his mystic union with ancestral 

 groups of plants and animals. 



Modern life, indeed, abounds in evidences of the 

 "mark of the beast" and any effort to reconstruct 

 the story of the past conflict leads to a recognition of 

 the fact that the story is still in the telling. There 

 has been no halt in the steady progress of the fray, 

 and man is still a changing, modifiable organism, 

 is still through selection being adapted to surrounding 

 nature by means of the mechanism which secured to him 

 sustenance and safety in the past and now secures 

 to him safety from bacterial, brute and human menace. 

 With changes in environment have come changes in 

 the conditions governing the contest, and correspond- 

 ing alterations in man's chief mechanism of adaptation 

 - the brain. The enemy without the clan has been 

 succeeded by the enemy within the clan, and clan 

 life itself, first used as a defense, has brought its own 

 quota of difficulties for the adjustment of which there 



