242 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLV. No. 1158 



It is significant that, wlien citing six me- 

 moirs relating to shipping, some of them quite 

 irrelevant, Mr. Means should have omitted all 

 reference to the writings of Paris, Pitt-Rivers, 

 Assmann and Friederici, where he will find the 

 evidence he imagines to be non-existent. But 

 does the argument from ships really help his 

 case ? Where is the " similarity of the work- 

 ing of the human mind " if the highly civilized 

 people of Peru and Mexico hadn't sufficient of 

 what Dr. Goldenweiser calls " happy thoughts " 

 to accomplish more in the way of ship-build- 

 ing? Is not this paucity of shipping merely 

 a token of the remoteness of America from 

 the home of its invention? 



The fact that the culture-bearers who first 

 crossed the Pacific by the Polynesian route 

 were searching for pearls and precious metals^ 

 is surely a sufficient explanation of their de- 

 sertion of the sea once they reached the Amer- 

 ican eldorado. 



Another of Mr. Means's difficulties I fail to 

 understand. Why was eight centuries too 

 brief a time for a ship to have made its way 

 from the Eed Sea to America? Before the 

 introduction of steam-ships what was to pre- 

 vent a vessel doing the journey as quickly in 

 the eighth century B.C. as in the eighth, or 

 perhaps even the eighteenth, a.d. ? There are 

 reasons, given in detail by Aymonier and 

 others, for believing that western culture had 

 already made its influence felt in Cambodia 

 before the close of the seventh century B.C. : 

 Indonesia and even Japan received the leaven 

 at the same time : and it can hardly be in doubt 

 that the ancient mariners did not limit their 

 easterly wanderings to Indonesia, but pushed 

 out into the Pacific, and soon afterwards 

 crossed it to America. 



The remaining difficulty which is holding 

 Mr. Means back is that the Pre-Columbian 

 Americans did not use wheeled vehicles. See- 



3 W. J. Perry, ' ' The Relationship between the 

 Geographical Distribution of Megalithic Monu- 

 ments and Ancient Mines," Manchester Lit. and 

 Phil. Soc. Memoirs, November, 1915; and J. Wil- 

 frid Jackson, "The Geographical Distribution of 

 the use of Pearls and Pearl-shell," ibid., Septem- 

 ber, 1916. 



ing that the whole of the migration, which I 

 have described as extending from the Red Sea 

 to America, consisted of a series of maritime 

 expeditions, it is not altogether clear what Mr. 

 Means is referring to when he asks: 



Is it not inevitable that they would have made 

 use of such vehicles during their long journey? 



At the time the great cultural movement 

 took place it is quite likely that none of the 

 wanderers had ever seen, or even perhaps 

 heard of, a wheeled vehicle. Even if, on some 

 rare occasion of state, in Egypt or one of the 

 Asiatic monarchies, they had seen the king 

 drive in a chariot, was that an adequate rea- 

 son why these sailors, when, after many years 

 of adventure, they at last reached the Ameri- 

 can coast, teeming with the spoils they coveted, 

 should have remembered the chariot, and at 

 once set to work to build carts and train 

 llamas to draw them? Surely the utter im- 

 probability of this whittles down Mr. Means's 

 difficulty to the vanishing point. Or alterna- 

 tively, if there is any substance in the " psychic 

 unity " hypothesis, why didn't the Americans 

 get a " happy thought " and invent " so simple 

 and obvious a device " as a wheeled vehicle ? 



Dr. Goldenweiser's objections are much 

 vaguer and less well-defined. From the latter 

 part of his letter I gather that he is not ac- 

 quainted with what I have written elsewhere 

 on this subject.* 



At the outset I must repudiate Dr. Golden- 

 weiser's unwarranted charge that I have 

 " apparently embraced the articles of the Graeb- 

 nerian faith." My attitude towards the prob- 

 lems of ethnology is that which prevailed 



* " On the Significance of the Geographical Dis- 

 tribution of the Practise of Mummification," 

 Mem. and Proc. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc, 

 July 7, 1915; republished by the Manchester Univ. 

 Press under the title "The Migrations of Early 

 Culture," August, 1915; "The Influence of An- 

 cient Egyptian Civilization in the East and in 

 America," Bull. John Eylands Library, March, 

 1916; ''Ships as Evidence of the Migrations of 

 Early Culture," Jour. Mane. Egy. and Oriental 

 Society; and Nature, November 25, 1915, p. 340; 

 December 16, 1915, and January 27, 1916, inter 

 alia. 



