MCGEE] EGOISM OF THE SEKI 133* 



is at least partially countervailed by conspicuous biotic characters, 

 such as color, stature, etc., so distinctive as almost to seem specific: 

 the Seri are distinctively dark-skinned, their extreme color-range (so 

 far as known) being' less than their nearest approach to any neighbor- 

 ing tribe; they are nearly as distinctive in stature, the difference 

 between their tallest and shortest normal adults being apparently less 

 than that between tlieir shortest and the tallest of the neighboring 

 Papago — though they are not so far from the more variable and often 

 tall Yaqui; and they appear to be no less distinctive in such physio- 

 logic processes as those connected with their extraordinary food habits. 

 Still more distinctive are the demotic characters connected with their 

 habits of life and modes of tliought; and whew the sum of biotic and 

 demotic characters is taken, the Seri are found to be set apart from all 

 neighboring Sonoran tribes by differences much more striking than the 

 individual range among themselves.' 



It is especially noteworthy that the Seri have held aloof from that 

 communality of tbe deserts which has brought so many tribes into 

 union with each other and with their animal and vegetal neighbors 

 through common strife against the common enemies of sun and sand — 

 the communality expressed in the distribution of vital colonies over 

 arid plains, in the toleration and domestication of animals, in the 

 development of agriculture, and eventually in the shaping of a com- 

 prehensive solidarity, with the intelligence of the highest organism as 

 the controlling factor.' Dwelling on a singularly prolific shore, the 

 Seri never learned the hard lesson of desert solidarity, but looked on 

 the land merely as a place of lodgment or concealment, or as a source 

 of luxuries such as cactus tunas, mesquite beans, and tasty game; 

 they never formed the first idea of planting or cultivating, and their 

 only notion of harvesting and storing against time of need was the 

 intolerably filthy one of nature's simi)lest teaching; they apparently 

 never grasped the concept of cooperation witli animals, and came to 

 tolerate the parasitical coyote only in that its persistence was greater 

 than their own, and in so far as it was stealthy enough to hide its 

 travail and the suckling of its young against their ravening maws; 

 and they apparently never rose to real recognition of their own kind 

 in alien forms, but set their hands against agricultural and zoocultural 

 humans as peculiarly potent and lience especially obnoxious animals. 

 Naturally their racial intolerance was seed of battle and blood-feud; 

 and they would doubtless have melted away under the general antag- 

 onism but for the natural barriers and unlimited food of their restricted 

 domain. 



At present, as for the later and best-known decades of their history, 



' It seems probable that the Seri were nearer to tribes of southern Baja California than to those of 

 Sonora at the time of the earliest explorations, yet that the distinction was sufficiently strong to 

 warrant the extension of the projioaition to these tribes also. 



2TIie Eetiinning of Agriculture, American Anthropologist, vol. vin. 1895, p. 350. The Begiuningof 

 Zooculture, ibid., vol. X, 1897, p. 215. 



