MCGEE] THE SERI RACE-SENSE 161* 



race-sense dominates the race type — that the Seri are farther away 

 from neighboring tribes in feeling than in features, in function than in 

 structure, in mind than in body. Now, in seeking the sources of this 

 distinctive (not to say specific) race-sense, several suggestions arise. 

 Naturally the first suggestion is that of simple sexual selection, the 

 (assumptive) analogue of an important factor in biotic evolution; but 

 the suggestion is at once apparently negatived by the fact that all the 

 mature men and women are married and have families of children pro- 

 portionate to their ages. True, undesirable fiances may be expelled 

 from the tribe, or even executed (as intimated by neighboring iSono- 

 renses); yet there is little evidence that either method of selection is 

 employed among the Seri more largely than among other peoples; and, 

 as all recent researches indicate, the higher peoples at least have risen 

 above the plane of sexual selection per se as an effective factor in 

 somatic; development. A second suggestion arises in the axiom (vivi- 

 fied by realization of the connection between Seri movements and Seri 

 structures) that perfected organs are the product of stressful function- 

 ing — indeed, the suggestion is but the extension of the axiom from the 

 individual to the stirp and the grouj). In developing the suggestion it 

 is convenient to divide the career of the stirp into periods defined by 

 the successive wax and wane of vitality in its most significant mani- 

 festations; and this may be done in terms of successive individual life- 

 times in their three successive aspects of (1) youth, (2) maturity, and (3) 

 senility, in which the dominant constructive functions are respectively 

 (1) somatic growth, (2) collective growth (comprising both procreation 

 and the accumulation of artificial possessions), and (3) dissipation of 

 somatic vitality and distribution of extrasomatic accumulations (gen- 

 erational as well as material and intellectual). Now, it is a common- 

 place in every stage of culture that vital capacity, and also the inheieut 

 sense of kind manifested in pairing, culminate in the medial portion, or 

 prime, of individual life; and if this universal recognition is valid, it 

 is just to hold that the career of the stirp is defined by the successive 

 vital climaxes expressing the primes of the series of generations per- 

 taining to the stirp. It follows that each generation must represent, 

 not the average qualities of the entire generation past, but the quali- 

 ties of the most virile and muliebrile fraction of that generation; 

 •whence it follows in turn that in general the generations must develop 

 along the lines most prominent in the lives of each people in their 

 prime. The process may be formulated as the laic of per iodic conjuga- 

 tion, under which successive generations are initiated, not at random, 

 but at periods of culminant etfectiveness in shaping the course of the 

 stirp. The immediate application of this law to the Seri tribe is mani- 

 fest, for it explains (the initial conditicm of isolation and the conse- 

 quent incipient segregative habit being given) how and why the tribal 

 standards have grown more definite from generation to generation, 

 and have interacted cumulatively with the distinctive environment in 

 such manner as continually to widen the chasm between the desert- 

 17 ETH 11 



