THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION 429 



nature of these influences in mind. The tendency in the third 

 period has been obviously to reduce vastly the importance of all 

 hindrances to contact arising from features of the environment. 

 Railways cross deserts and tunnels pierce mountains, and that 

 amount of contact, small though it may be, which owing to 

 the inventions of writing and printing now occurs between all 

 parts of the world, can transmit more tradition than wide 

 avenues of contact between neighbouring peoples previously 

 made possible. 



Here we can leave this matter. It has been worked out in 

 much detail. All that is necessary for our purpose is to bear in 

 mind the fact, which indeed is obvious, that contact is in various 

 ways hindered and facilitated by geographical causes. 



7. We have now to consider what is less familiar — the bearing 

 of what we may call economic factors upon contact. These 

 factors are themselves but an expression of the working of the 

 economic system, and the economic system is correlated with 

 fertility though modified by the degree and kind of contact 

 allowed by the geographical environment. Therefore in con- 

 sidering the working of these economic factors, we are in fact 

 considering another aspect of the manner in which the environ- 

 ment bears thus indirectly upon contact. 



Progress in skill, as we have said, is correlated with increasing 

 density of population, and, other things being equal, the greater 

 the density of population, the more contact there is. But other 

 things are not equal ; the chief disturbing factors are those 

 connected with the organization of society in their influence both 

 upon the quality and quantity of contact. The vast importance 

 of the step which led to the origin of primitive society has already 

 been remarked upon. When we observe primitive society in 

 more detail, it is seen that, compared with the type of organiza- 

 tion which arose in the third period, this form of society essentially 

 consists of a repetition of similar elements.^ A perfect type of 

 this form of society would be one which consisted merely of a 

 collection of famihes, not differing essentially one from another, 

 each being a microcosm of the whole society. Actually wo find 

 that primitive society is usually composed of the repetition of 

 larger elements than the family, which Durkheim calls ' clans '. 

 This term is employed in order to mark the family and political 



• See Durkheim, Travail Social, chs. vi and vii. 



