April 29, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



405 



have revealed or when it could not have re- 

 vealed crime to the night-wandering witness. 

 There is nothing remarkable that Lincoln 

 should have cornered his witness as well as 

 Alcibiades by a device that lay near the sur- 

 face ever since man became a sublunar biped. 

 But neither is there anything remarkable, in- 

 deed I believe the biographies assert it as 

 fact, that Lincoln in his youth was a reader 

 of Plutarch's lives, possibly of Chamber's 

 " Book of Days " too, where one can meet 

 with the same tale. At any rate the stories 

 always amuse, when first met with, and 

 wherever met with often instruct. They 

 should not be suppressed by uncharitable 

 charges of plagiarism, because it does not 

 seem worth while, even if the charge is cor- 

 rect, to spoil the story and wipe out its humor 

 by the introduction of clumsy and pedantic 

 references. 



The interest in anthropological problems as 

 well as in those of ethnology is so specialized 

 and within their own lines is so absorbing 

 that the light psychology might thi'ow on them 

 has been somewhat neglected — very much so 

 until very recently. And yet Tylor's ground 

 thought was that psychology plays a large 

 part in anthropology even if the human mind 

 is everywhere ab initio of the same nature. 

 He, or some of his followers at least, are not 

 even disposed to allow as much fundamental 

 differentiation as they apply to the shape of 

 the skull or that of the nose. However that 

 may be they have compelled us to acknowledge 

 that it reacts very much in the same way to 

 the same environment and the same stimuli 

 and this places us at once in view of the link, 

 some may think rather tenuous, which at- 

 taches ethnology to plagiarism. I hope with 

 the expansion I have given to that term, in 

 what has preceded, this is at least discernible. 

 I tried once to show* that, starting with prim- 

 itive man's idea of disease etiology, the 

 demons of disease became those of heresy or 

 their first cousins, and inasmuch as a good 

 purge was a good way to get rid of disease 



4 "The Demons of Heresy and the Demons of 

 Disease in the Processes of Thought," New Yortc 

 Medical JouttmI, February 23, 1918. 



devils, so it w^s also for false doctrine, vile 

 thoughts, evil emotions, pride, jealously, in- 

 justice. So early and so firmly bound to- 

 gether in this channel in all the languages of 

 modern civilized races became the association 

 that " purge " still persists ia them all as 

 applied to mental and religious and legal 

 categories ages after the devils of disease had 

 disappeared from medicine, a quite grotesque 

 and absurd correlation between widely differ- 

 ent concepts in modern thought. One stares 

 with surprise, both in Pliny^ and in School- 

 craft's'^ accoTint of American Indians, at the 

 menstruating woman going around crops 

 naked at night to chase away the vermin 

 from the corn, or was it in both cases som.e 

 fertility rite that was observed and misinter- 

 preted? We are scarcely less astonished to 

 find the plumed serpent in American aborig- 

 inal religion more or less closely paralleling 

 that of the Asiatic. I do not know if any 

 hooded snake may have existed or may still 

 exist in America to account for this detail of 

 coincidence, very astonishing unless we think 

 of the same environmental influences in India 

 and America. We get no trace of the dead- 

 liness of anything resembling that of the 

 cobra as having ever moved the mind of man 

 in America to stand in awe before its power 

 and worship it. But whether the American 

 savage brought the plumed snake from eastern 

 Asia in medicine bundles across the Straits 

 of Behring or across the Pacific or whether 

 his imagination created the coincidence, still 

 we see two of the principles prominently asso- 

 ciated with plagiarism here in this distant 

 ethnological territory brought into play. One 

 is the persistance with which the mind moves 

 in channels once entered, the other is the 

 promptness with which it enters those chan- 

 nels once it is placed in a certain environ- 

 ment. I fancy this exemplification torn with 

 some violence from a foreign field is helpful 

 in making us realize how the tendency to 

 plagiarism is one deeply, immutably rooted 



Pliny, "Historia Naturalis," Liber XXVIII., 

 Ed. Sillig, Vol. IV., p. 277. 



6 Schoolcraft, Henry E., "The Indian Tribes of 

 the United States," Part 5, p. 70. 



