158 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



American culture, there is some difierence of opinion as to the equipment 

 of the original immigrants, coming across, it is supposed, from North-East 

 Asia. The chief items mentioned by Kroeber (in 1923), for example, are 

 the dog, bow, harpoon, fire-drill, woven and twined basketry, perhaps the 

 spear-thrower, stone implements and the beginning of the grinding of 

 stone ; as perhaps introduced later from Asia, he mentions the skin-boat, 

 sinew-backed bow, tailored skin-clothing, coiled basketry. It will be 

 realised that for such a meagre initial outfit to expand into the complexity 

 of the higher Amerind cultures, there must have prevailed a degree of 

 opportunism and inventiveness comparable with that of the peoples of the 

 Old World ; and that for the results to be so closely similar, the ' common 

 faculties ' of man must have been in good working order. 



In his recent Huxley Lecture, Nordenskiold discussed this question 

 of the inventiveness of the American Indian from a standpoint which did 

 not exclude the possibility of outside influence. He was, in fact, in 

 search of cases in which the evidence of indigenous origin seemed worthy 

 of acceptance. It is not possible here to discuss the culture-traits he 

 regards as American in origin and development, by far the most important 

 of which are agriculture, pottery-making, and bronze-working, but it must 

 be observed that in the main the case he unintentionally makes is that of 

 the won-inventiveness of the American Indian, with regard to tools and 

 other artefacts. Those which he accepts as indigenous in the New World 

 are mainly either of simple types, very little removed from their beginnings, 

 or are the results of substitution and other factors in which invention is 

 not involved. We may exclude as irrelevant the discoveries of native 

 food-plants, 'for reasons already given. 



The idea of the progressiveness of the American Indian depends in 

 reality upon the assumption that from the hunting and food-gathering 

 culture of the first immigrants there were developed, without extraneous 

 assistance, the high cultures of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. As 

 we have just noted, however, his apparent progress, whilst advancing, on 

 this assumption, more or less parallel with that of the Old World in 

 numerous culture-traits, stopped abruptly at many points which were in 

 the Old World over- run. He missed mutations that were essential to 

 further parallelism, but by dint of discovery, substitution, and variation, 

 he was led to the production of those superficial differences that characterise 

 many American inventions and discovery-complexes. There was little 

 that he did better than it was done elsewhere, and much that he never did 

 at all. If on his own account he made the discoveries leading to such 

 achievements as agriculture, bronze-working, pottery-making, and if he 

 invented the hoe, the push-quern, the pestle and mortar, the loom, the 

 corbelled arch, and much else, how was it that his genius failed him when 

 it might have carried him still further along the lines determined by his 

 ' common faculties ' ? Why was it that it was always he, and not his 

 Old World rival, who fell behind in the race ? Why is it, also, that there 

 is so much in the higher, as well as the lower, American cultures that 

 compel comparison with Eastern Asia, and not with, let us say. Neolithic 

 or Bronze Age Western Europe 1 It would seem that we have to choose 

 between explaining and explaining away, or, more precisely, between 

 diffusion and the common faculties of man. 



Without venturing further into this side of the question, there is one 



i 



