i 3 4 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



for the stag, whose weapons are hoofs and horns; for the 

 nautilus, whose house is his shell; and for the dandelion seed, 

 which sails about on its supporting structure. 



But not all these cultural products are made of substances. 

 They are often immaterial forms of organization and conduct. 

 Specialization of labor is a cultural adjustment for readier self- 

 maintenance, saving as it does time, effort, and material, and 

 yet winning to a better product. Marriage is a cultural ad- 

 justment by which two very differently endowed sexes get 

 along together and rear young. Government is a cultural 

 adjustment resulting in orderly and peaceful human relations. 

 All economic, political, and other social systems, economies, 

 and institutions are cultural adjustments to life-conditions of 

 maintenance and sex, and of others presented to men in their 

 earthly life. Good government is as much a favorable adjust- 

 ment as is the web foot of a duck, and polygamy is as obsolete 

 an adjustment for us as five toes came to be for the horse. 



If this is so, the fact of adjustment, and the need of it, is 

 as patent in the case of mankind as it is in that of other 

 animals or of plants. Only it is attained, in the former case, 

 by factors not precisely the same as in the latter. We shall 

 come to these factors presently. The outstanding fact, thus 

 far, is that plant and animal adjustments are typically physical, 

 while human adjustment is typically not physical. It is mental. 



It is also social. Civilization is the product of numbers and 

 the contact of numbers. The new invention, representing a 

 better adjustment to life-conditions, say the gas-engine, never 

 springs full-fledged out of the brain of any individual. The 

 one who gets the credit for it is at best but the last of a long 

 line of experimenters, who has added the finishing touch 

 where, indeed, he is not the exploiter who merely appropriates 

 the results of a long series of labors in which he has borne no 

 part. Much less did any individual invent marriage or prop- 

 erty, though tradition sometimes accredits them to a mythical 



