ii8o LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



since working out the social primacy and the persistence of its 

 "hunter-formation" more fuUy than heretofore. 



LATER OCCUPATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS, AND THEIR 

 SIGNIFICANCE. — Other occupations have of course claimed their 

 turn ; but their study has been long delayed and discouraged by the 

 too superficial treatment of conventional economists: witness their 

 so-called "transition through hunting, pastoral, and agricultural 

 stages" to their predominant industrial age; as if all these regional 

 occupations were not enduring ones, and each full of anthropologic 

 and evolutionary^ interest and social significance of its own. Hence one 

 of the many difficulties of Le Play and his disciples in their renewed 

 investigation of the nature-occupations throughout their ranges 

 and interactions. Comprehensively to trace from simplest types and 

 into modern times not only the hunter and the fisher, but the 

 shepherd and the peasant in all their varieties, and from origins to 

 outcomes, and of course the miner and the woodman too, and these 

 in their wanderings and their interactions, has, however, been shown 

 as an essential task before anthropologic and social studies, and 

 these throughout geography and history, to our own places and 

 times. For on these lines of inquiry there have been emerging more 

 orderly methods, both of specialised inquiry and of comprehensive 

 survey, and with interpretations accordingly; and with all these 

 extending into many fields, formerly more or less isolated, and 

 indeed still too much so. Anthropologist, sociologist, and psycholo- 

 gist, with historian, economist and more, may thus increasingly 

 co-operate towards unravelling the long and tangled successions and 

 inter-relations they seek to understand, and these as not so simply 

 racial and conflicting, as many would still have us believe, but also 

 as occupational, and cultural accordingly. In this way the long and 

 chequered drama of human evolution may be more truly presented, 

 and with clearer realisation of its resulting complexity of social 

 heritage. 



Every naturalist knows how much Darwin learned from his 

 Animals and Plants under Domestication', yet this subject, now 

 being rejuvenesced by Mendelian breeders, may also gain fuller 

 light when taken along with the inter-acting natural history, pre- 

 history, and history of their domesticator, man himself. Certainly 

 the humanistic studies do so; for we are increasingly seeing how 

 these animals have also domesticated man, and these plants have 

 cultivated him. Great though have been the influences of the wild 

 upon its strenuous and cunning hunter-folk, these others have been 

 yet deeper and finer ones. Thus "the good shepherd" is sheep- 

 educated, lamb-educated; the predominantly gentle Indian peoples, 

 with their Brahmins, are cow-educated beyond all others; their 

 magnificent princes, their amazing mahouts too, are each in his 



