BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 869 



a visit to any collection of flint implements. In such a collection 

 as Mr. Tylor has pointed out, p. 205, we are very soon impressed 

 with the marked uniformity which characterises these implements, 

 whether modern or thousands of years old, whether found on this 

 side of the world or the other. For example, a flint arrow-head 

 which came into my hands a short time back, through the kindness 

 of Lord Antrim, after having- done duty in these iron times as 

 a charm at the bottom of a water-tub for cattle in Ireland, was 

 pointed out or at to me by a very distinguished Canadian naturalist, 

 who was visiting Oxford the other day, as being closely similar to 

 the weapons manufactured by the Canadian Indians. Now after 

 such an experience one may do well to ask in Mr. Tylor's words 

 (' Early History,' p. 206), — 



' How, then, is this remarkable uniformity to be explained ? The 

 principle that man does the same thing under the same circum- 

 stances will account for much, but it is very doubtful whether it 

 can be stretched far enough to account for even the greater propor- 

 tion of the facts in question. The other side of the argument is, of 

 course, that resemblance is due to connexion, and the truth is 

 made up of the two, though in what proportions we do not know. 

 It may be that, though the problem is too obscure to be worked 

 out alone, the uniformity of development in different regions of the 

 Stone age may some day be successfully brought in with other 

 lines of argument, based on deep-lying agreements in culture which 

 tend to centralise the early history of races of very unlike appear- 

 ances, and living in widely distant ages and countries.' 



If the psychological identity of our species may explain the 

 identity of certain customs, its physiological identity may explain 

 certain others. Some of this latter class are of a curious kind, and 

 relate not to matters of social or family, but to matters of purely 

 personal and individual interest, concerning as they do the sensi- 

 bility, and with it all the other functions of the living body. Such 

 customs are the wearing of labrets or lip-rings, nose-rings, and, if 

 I may add it without offence, of certain other rings inserted in the 

 wide region supplied by the fifth or trifacial nerve ^ A physio- 

 logical explanation may lie at the base of these practices, which 

 appear to put at the disposal of the persons who adopt them a 

 perennial means for setting up an irritation, whence reflex con- 

 ^ See * Medicine in Modern Times,' p. 57, Article XL, p. 698. 



