288 JUNGLE PEACE 



required — flat-footed, with arm-pits on knees, or 

 on the balls of the feet with elbows on knees. 

 Thus is every muscle shifted and relaxed. 



Squatting is one of the many things which a 

 white man may learn from watching his shika- 

 rees and guides, and which, in the wilderness, 

 he may adopt without losing caste. We are a 

 chair-ridden people, and dare hardly even cross 

 our knees in public. Yet how many of us enjoy 

 sitting Buddha-fashion, or as near to it as we 

 can attain, when the ban of society is lifted! 

 A chairless people, however, does not neces- 

 sarily mean a more simple, primitive type. The 

 Japanese method of sitting is infinitely more dif- 

 ficult and complex than ours. The characters 

 of our weak-thighed, neolithic forbears are as 

 yet too pronounced in our own bodies for us to 

 keep an upright position for long. Witness the 

 admirable admittance of this anthropological 

 fact by the architects of our subway cars, who 

 know that only a tithe of their patrons will be 

 fortunate enough to find room on the cane- 

 barked seats which have come to take the place 

 of the stumps and fallen logs of a hundred 

 thousand years ago. So they have thought- 

 fully strung upper reaches of the cars with imi- 



