August 11, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



191 



when any cultural resemblance is discov- 

 ered there is no incentive on the part of 

 those whose faculties have been so lulled to 

 sleep to seek for an explanation : all that is 

 necessary is to murmur the incantation and 

 bow the knee to a fetish certainly no less 

 puerile and unsatisfying than that of an 

 African negro. It does not seem to occur to 

 most modern ethnologists that the whole 

 teaching of history is fatal to the idea of 

 inventions being made independently. 

 Originality is one of the rarest manifesta- 

 tions of human faculty. For many cen- 

 turies countless millions of men must have 

 witnessed the effects of steam before the 

 simple and obvious inference was made and 

 it was put to a mechanical use ; but if, not 

 knowing the history of the invention of the 

 steam engine, we were to adopt the stereo- 

 typed ethnological doctrines of the present 

 day the wide geographical distribution of 

 the steam-engine should be regarded as a 

 most striking illustration of the "similarity 

 of the working of the human mind." Nor 

 does it appear to have struck the orthodox 

 ethnologist that his so-called "psycholog- 

 ical" explanation and the meaningless 

 phrase "similarity of the working of the 

 human mind" run counter to all the teach- 

 ing of modern psychology. For it is the 

 outstanding feature of human instincts that 

 they are extremely generalized and vaguely 

 defined, and not of the precise and highly- 

 specialized character which modern ethno- 

 logical speculation attributes to them. Nor 

 again is the case strengthened by the mis- 

 use of the word "evolution," for the inde- 

 pendent development of such an artificial 

 confection as civilization postulates the 

 existence of factors utterly alien to the biol- 

 ogist 's conception of evolution. 



Why then, it will be asked, in the face of 

 the overwhelming mass of definite and well- 

 authenticated evidence clearly pointing to 

 the sources in the Old World from which 



American civilization sprung, do so many 

 ethnologists refuse to accept the clear and 

 obvious meaning of the facts and resort to 

 such childish subterfuges as I have men- 

 tioned ? 



Putting aside the influence of Darwin's 

 work, the misunderstanding of which, as 

 Huxley remarked, "led shallow persons to 

 talk nonsense in the name of anthropolog- 

 ical science," the main factor in blinding 

 so many investigators to appreciate the 

 significance of the data they themselves so 

 laboriously collect results from a defect 

 incidental to the nature of their researches. 

 The intensive study of a localized area re- 

 veals difficulties in explaining every stage 

 in the process of transmission of customs 

 from one spot to another, which the in- 

 vestigator is apt to magnify into insuper- 

 able obstacles against the view that the 

 practises or beliefs in question did spread. 

 The failure to recognize the fact, recently 

 demonstrated so convincingly by Dr. Rivers, 

 that useful arts are often lost is another, 

 and perhaps the chief, difficulty that has 

 stood in the way of an adequate apprecia- 

 tion of the history of the spread of civiliza- 

 tion. 



Bearing these considerations in mind and 

 turning to the positive evidence that estab- 

 lishes the reality of the migrations of cul- 

 ture-bearing peoples, it will be found that 

 there is now available a vast mass of precise 

 and unquestionable testimony in substan- 

 tiation of the conclusion that the curiously 

 distinctive culture-complex which was 

 gradually built up in Egypt between the 

 years b.c. 4,000 and b.c. 900 began to be 

 widely diffused, at some time after the 

 latter date, west, south and east, and that 

 the latter (the easterly migration), with 

 many additions and modifications which it 

 received on the way (in the Soudan, East 

 Africa, and Arabia ; in the eastern Mediter- 

 ranean, Phoenicia, Armenia and Babylonia ; 



