H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 155 



made that the bamboo rod readily supplied a natural socket, which would 

 serve in place of the peg for effecting the discharge of the spear. Then 

 followed the intentional construction of spear-throwers with socket 

 instead of peg, and we may call the step- — which may or may not be regarded 

 as a progressive step — a free-mutation. If it happened as the result of a 

 discovery, as suggested, it was free from any influences from other 

 implements or mechanisms. It is impossible to be sure that no such 

 outside influence was at work, but the step being decisive and discontinuous 

 it was at any rate a mutational step, and not variational. We may 

 assume with some degree of probability that free-mutation initiated the 

 provision of the foot-rest on the digging-stick, a grip or handle on the 

 stone knife, the detaching head of the spear to produce the harpoon, the 

 sling-hafting of the flail, and that it was concerned in the origin of other 

 types of hafting, as well as in the modifications of components to adapt or 

 improve them for combination in a constructed artefact. Primary 

 mutation, followed by variations which led to change in form, stimulated 

 by discoveries in relation to method, and often influenced by substitution, 

 led to other discoveries which could be ajjplied for the improvement of the 

 form or construction of artefacts, and these applied discoveries may be 

 called free-mutations. In this way there were produced many implements 

 of a simple character, some having form alone, others showing construction 

 and often mechanism. 



So far we have identified no inventive foresight of a kind that would 

 lead directly to the subjective preconception of a new or improved type 

 of implement, differing in any important res^ject from what had gone 

 before. We know, however, that in our own times the inventor designs 

 his products in advance. This is not to say that at some stage in the 

 evolution of material culture there was a sudden change in the mentality 

 of man. Discovery and imitation lay at the root of all his methods, 

 initiated all his artefacts, and led to the appearance of free-mutations, but 

 when he had established a variety of artefacts that had construction as 

 well as form, he began that process of transfer and adaptation of structural 

 and mechanical characters for which I have suggested the term cross- 

 mutation. These, like the other mutations already defined, were abrupt 

 and discontinuous changes which could not have arisen gradually by 

 variation, but, unlike other mutations, they owed their origin to a combina- 

 tion of features, or an application of ' principles,' which had evolved in 

 independence. The process corresponds to what Mr. Henry Balfour has 

 laid great stress upon as hybridisation. It is a process involving foresight, 

 in predicting the possibility of combination, and ingenuity in effecting it. 

 A cross-mutation is a true invention, a product of the inventive faculty, 

 unaffected by discovery in its first conception, though the inventor 

 nowadays may need to make discoveries in relation to materials and 

 methods before he can test the viability of his inventive forecast. Through 

 it all runs the opportunist thread that may be plainly seen in the historical 

 retrospect. Combinations for inventive purposes can only occur to the 

 mind in an artificial environment in which the two (or more) elements 

 of the combination are at hand, and these may have been evolved in 

 entirely different artefacts or contexts. 



Accepting these arguments as valid, an invention proper — as distinct 

 from our loose application of the term to shaped and constructed artefacts 



