MCGEE] GENESIS OF INSTITUTIONS 295* 



ences are found ; and practically all of the more couspicnous differences 

 extend in the s;ime direction — i. e., they combine to indicate an excep- 

 tionally primitive, or lowly, or zoic, plane for the simple savages of Seri- 

 land. Thus, few tribes are so poor in esthetic as the Seri, and in none 

 other are the esthetic devices so clearly and so exclusively zoic; few if 

 any other known tribes so clearly exemplify zoomimic culture; none 

 other so well represents protolithic culture, and no other known tribe 

 is so completely devoid of mechanical devices reflecting higher culture; 

 in general socialry no other known tribe better, or indeed so well, exem- 

 plifies zoocracy, while in such special features as those of ethnogamic 

 mating, ceremonial scatophagy, and mortuary magnification of the 

 blood-carriers, the folk mark the most primitive known phase of cultural 

 advancement; and although language and faith yield less definite 

 measure, their testimony is coincident with that of the other lines of 

 activity. Accordingly the Seri must be assigned to the initial place in 

 the scale of cultural development represented by the American aborig- 

 ines, and hence to the lowest recognized phase of savagery. 



Two or three corollaries of this placement are noteworthy: (1) lu 

 most of the researches concerning liuman development conducted by the 

 anthropologists of the world, attention has been given chietiy or wholly 

 to the somatic or biotic characters of Homo sapiens; but while various 

 physical featuresof the Seri suggest bestial affinities (as has been pointed 

 out in an earlier chapter), it is especially significant that the nearest and 

 clearest indications of bestial relationship are found in the psychical 

 features of the lowly folk — for zoic faith in its multifarious manifesta- 

 tions is but a reflection of burgeoning yet still bestial mind. 



(2) While human independence of environment culminates in socialry, 

 the interdependence of activital lines so well revealed in lowest savagery 

 demonstrates that institutions and all government necessarily reflect 

 environment; and, at the same time, that the jjrogressive emancipation 

 from environment signalized in the higher culture-grades measures the 

 conquest of Nature through industrial activity— for both the productive 

 work and the g,ttendaut exercise cumulatively elevate sapient Man 

 above mindless Nature. 



(3) An adjunctof progress in every stage of development, as indicated 

 with especial clearness in the earliest stages, is the annulment or 

 curtailment of both physical and formal law, and the substitution of 

 cumulativeljf growing volition : the development of the esthetic passes 

 from the intuitive toward the ratiocinative, that of the industrial from 

 the instinctive toward the inventive, and that of the social from the 

 merely reflective to the vigorously constructive; with every pulse of 

 progress the subservience to blind chance and Imaginative figment 

 diminishes; and with each increment of sound confidence the ability 

 to surmount physical obstruction and to dispense with primitive for- 

 mality is cumulatively augmented. 



