LII REPORT OF THE BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY 



illustrate the strong hold of mysticism on the primitive imag- 

 ination. The human mind is preeminently characterized by 

 a desire for knowledge; so the novel and unusual are ever 

 attractive to normal eyes, and as knowledge progresses the 

 normal observer strives to learn more and more of the attract- 

 ive object, and when the limit of observation is reached, the 

 observer is impelled to enter the fields of generalization and 

 inference in order that he may conceive that which he can not 

 directly perceive. In these respects all men, savage or civil- 

 ized, illiterate or cultured, are alike in kind, though there is a 

 difference in degree, for among civilized and cultured peoples 

 the thirst for knowledge is the more acute, while the powers 

 of observing and reasoning are trained toward accuracy and 

 trustworthiness. When the civilized observer encounters an 

 unfamiliar fact, his first impulse is to explain it, and an expla- 

 nation is sought in terms of experience, and he is able to draw 

 not only on his own stock of individual experience but on the 

 experience of others as crystallized in custom, craft, and liter- 

 ature; and the test of the explanation is found in its conformity 

 to experience, individual and general. When a primitive 

 observer encounters an unfamiliar fact, he normally seeks to 

 explain it in like manner in terms of experience, but he is 

 handicapped by feeble intellectual grasp, by poverty in that 

 general experience which is stored up and made available only 

 by means of letters, and by the slovenly fashion of appeal to 

 the mystical ; and if the fact lies beyond the borders of every- 

 day experience there is no test for the explanation other than 

 comparison with a body of explanations of which all may 

 be equally incompetent. Herein lies the essential difference 

 between the scientific hypothesis and the primitive hypothesis; 

 the one is formulated and expressed in terms of experience, 

 the other rests on appeal to the unknown; and it is to be 

 remembered that partly for this reason the ratio of hypothesis 

 to observation is much larger among the primitive and illiterate 

 than among the cultured So the typical Indian explanation 

 of things involves appeal to the unknown, and through habit 

 the unknown itself has come to be formulated in terms of the 

 mysterious. The explanation of the color bands of the raccoon, 



