THE AIMS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 67 



the patriarch who is saved in it arose independently in western 

 Asia, in Mexico, and in South America, as well as in many inter- 

 vening places, alike even in details, and yet neither borrowed one 

 from the other nor yet drawn from a cpmmon source. But until 

 he understands this he has not caught up with the progress of 

 ethnologic science. 



So it is also with the motives of primitive art, be they sym- 

 bolic or merely decorative. How many volumes have been writ- 

 ten tracing the migrations and connections of nations by the dis- 

 tribution of some art motive, say the svastika, the meander, or 

 the cross ! And how little of value is left in all such speculations 

 by the rigid analysis of primitive arts that we see in such works as 

 Dr. Grossed Anfange der Kunst, or Dr. Haddon's attractive mono- 

 graph on the Decorative Art of British New Guinea, published 

 last year ! The latter sums up in these few and decisive words 

 the result of such researches pursued on strictly inductive lines : 

 " The same processes operate on the art of decoration, whatever 

 the subject, wherever the country, whenever the age." This is 

 equally true of the myth and the folk tale, of the symbol and the 

 legend, of the religious ritual and the musical scale. 



I have even attempted, 1 hope not rashly, to show that there 

 are quite a number of important words, in languages nowise re- 

 lated by origin and contact, which are phonetically the same or 

 similar, not of the mimetic class, but arising from certain common 

 relations of the physiological function of language ; and I have 

 urged that words of this class should not be accounted of value in 

 studying the affiliations of language. 



And I have also endeavored to demonstrate that the sacred- 

 ness which we observe attached to certain numbers, and the same 

 numbers, in so many mythologies and customs the world over, is 

 neither fortuitous nor borrowed the one from the other, but de- 

 pends on fixed relations which the human body bears to its sur- 

 roundings, and the human mind to the laws of its own activity ; 

 and therefore that all such coincidences and their consequences 

 and it is surprising how far-reaching these are do not belong 

 to the similarities which reveal contact, but only to those which 

 testify to psychical unity. 



So numerous and so amazing have these examples of culture 

 identities become of late years that they have led more than one 

 student of ethnology into a denial of the freedom of the human 

 will under any of the definitions of voluntary action. But the 

 aims of ethnology are not so aspiring. It is strictly a natural 

 science, dealing with outward things to wit, the expressions of 

 man's psychical life, endeavoring to ascertain the conditions of 

 their appearance and disappearance, the organic laws of their 

 birth, growth, and decay. These laws must undoubtedly be cor- 



