ii88 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Hence therefore there went that supreme procession yearly to 

 Pallas' Temple, of maiden's graduation to womanhood, gallantly 

 escorted; of which we have the inestimable record in the Elgin 

 Marbles. 



Enough, then, for suggestions towards the significant, and indeed 

 often paramount, importance of woman and her work and ways in 

 the origins of civilisation. Anthropology is probably of all sciences 

 the one which can least be adequately worked out by men alone, 

 seldom though their expeditions and their books show they realise 

 this. Indeed, they often altogether overlook their masculine deficien- 

 cies of feeling and limitations of insight, even when recognising their 

 difficulties in understanding strange manners and customs. More 

 explorers and observers like Mary Kingsley are thus needed, and 

 throughout all lands; and so, too, are studious interpreters, with 

 insight towards deepening scholarship, like Jane Harrison. Happily 

 such are coming forward, though as yet too few. 



In conclusion, then, let us search out, and visualise, even to 

 dramatisation — as at the caverns round our archccological station 

 aforesaid, as well as in other places — the facts and interpretations 

 of social origins, and th s with something of laboratory towards 

 experimentally recapitulating them, with suggestiveness accordingly. 

 Here the help of woman is indispensable; and this not only to 

 understand her own part, but man's as well. From such experience 

 we can go back to our naturalistic ecology, as to Arachne the spider, 

 Melissa the bee, Hestia the nest-builder; and thence forward anew 

 into human society, with deeper because more sympathetic under- 

 standing of the psycho-ecology of the sexes. Indeed, thence back 

 once more, even towards clearer understanding of the corresponding 

 animal psychology; so tracing, even further than has Bergson, the 

 rise and development of instinct and intelligence, with their 

 respective distinctness, yet their interactions also; and for both 

 sexes, by turns and together. 



THE CHANGING STATUS OF THE SEXES.— The old-world 

 importance attached to matrilinear descent, so natural to early con- 

 ditions, in which the mother has all responsibility for the child, has 

 long been famihar to anthropologists ; among whom important writers 

 of a past generation came to insist on early society as essentially 

 "matriarchal". And though a strong reaction was provoked by the 

 institutional emphasis, and even the governmental sense, of such 

 a term — especially in the meanings which men tend to give to it — 

 not a few reasons remain for seeking a fresh term (say matriprimal?) 

 to express the highly important, and in various ways even pre- 

 dominant influences of woman in early society: as from the well- 

 founded traditions of mother-goddesses to the substantial initia- 

 tives and contributions of woman as inventor and civiliser, and 



