288 



The National Geographic Magazine 



in time some of these grew into the cus- 

 tom of interclan mating, thereby learn- 

 ing for the first time in the human world 

 the great lesson of experience, that in 

 union there is strength ; in this way 

 some clans grew into tribes, while others 

 were either absorbed or extinguished 

 under the hard law of natural selection — 

 and the vestiges and proof of this stage 

 survive today among the leaf-wearing 

 and rat-eating savages of southeastern 

 Asia, savages whose gods are beasts and 

 whose worship is debasing fear. In 

 this stage the law of organization was 

 maternal descent — for at the outset and 

 long after, the mj^stery of paternity re- 

 mained unsolved. With the growth of 

 tribes along the fecund lowlands, some 

 were forced into the adjacent uplands, 

 and eventually into the higher moun- 

 tains ; the relief from tribal pressure 

 brought partial surcease of strife, j^et 

 demanded harder peaceful labor, sharper 

 shrewdness in the chase, greater activity 

 of body and mind ; so that those who 

 would purchase peace bought at the cost 

 of vigorous exercise, yet were in due 

 time rewarded by the superior faculty 

 born of stressful organic function. In- 

 cidentally those who pushed highest on 

 the Titanic stairway leading to the Roof 

 of the World breathed the more deeply 

 and of a purer air ; the hepatic activity 

 required to throw off the miasmatic poi- 

 sons of the coast diminished, and the 

 respiratory activity required by longer 

 journeying and steeper climbing in- 

 creased in larger measure — and thereby 

 the excess of pigment in skin and inner 

 tissues was eliminated, and the face of 

 the human forbear bleached to brown, 

 to yellow, and at last to the tinted white- 

 ness of standards which grew as the color 

 changed. This was but one of the ways 

 of human beautification, whereby prog- 

 'nathic jaws were retracted, arms short- 

 ened, legs straightened, and the hirsute 

 covering cast off and concentrated to the 

 feminine crown and masculine halo — 



but this most entrancing of all the lines 

 of human progress, measuring as it does 

 the rise of young affection and the 

 growth of human feeling, must be 

 passed over.* Meantime strength grew 

 with exercise and self-confidence with 

 strength, until the hill tribesmen and 

 the denizens of deserts made conquest 

 of their animal contemporaries, slaying 

 the fierce and taming the gentle, and so 

 far made conquest of trees and rocks as 

 to utilize them for tools and utensils ; 

 and as self-confidence grew, fear and 

 worship were withdrawn from visible 

 beasts, from tangible trees and rocks 

 and rivers, and were concentrated on the 

 remoter mysteries of sun and storm — 

 though these were long personified as 

 superpotent animals. Meantime, too, 

 the problem of paternity was solved, and 

 the law was so reconstructed as to cluster 

 about paternal relationship. This stage 

 in the development of the Asian people 

 is represented today by some of the hill 

 tribes of India, some of the remoter folk 

 of Thibet, some of the groups about 

 Lake Baikal ; it is represented also by 

 the world' s best-known records of patri- 

 archy in olden times. 



The meaningful feature of the growth 

 from savage clan to patriarchal tribe 

 thus outlined is its spontaneity, its ne- 

 cessit)^ ; for, wdth the given conditions 

 of organic structure and budding intelli- 

 gence, the way from savagery to bar- 

 barism is certain and sure as the growth 

 of the plant from its seed, as the develop- 

 ment of the insect from egg to larva, as 

 the flow of a river formed by highland 

 tributaries on its way to the sea. Herein 

 lies the lesson of the special usefulness 

 of the great culture-phases in the classi- 

 fication of mankind ; they may be lik- 



* The subject may be pursued in ' ' The Trend 

 of Human Progress," American Anthropolo- 

 gist, n. s., vol. I, 1899, pp. 415-418, and in 

 "The Seri Indians," Seventeenth Report of 

 the Bureau of American Ethnology, part i, 

 1898, especially pp. 154-163, 279-287. 



