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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 66. 



other travelers must journey far and in lim- 

 ited groups, and hence there is an incentive 

 toward grouping by physical parity which 

 is more or less independent of kinship or 

 biotic affinity. Other tendencies also enter ; 

 but individiially and conjointly thej^ make 

 for altruism, and eventually for a humanity 

 and charity transcending family ties and 

 gentile bonds. Now the characteristics of 

 the Papago, as recorded by dififerent ob- 

 servers during the last 350 years, comprise 

 dignity and courage, docility and virtue, 

 humanity and intelligence, hospitality and 

 integrity ; and these characteristics, which 

 are akin to those of civilization, are among 

 those toward which his hard environment 

 tends. Thus it would appear that these 

 people of the desert have been forced by 

 environment toward civilization ; and it 

 would appear also that, just as the plants 

 and animals have been hurried into the 

 higher stages of phylogenic development by 

 physical pressure, the Papago have been 

 forced into civilized relations before acquir- 

 ing civilized culture. The course of human 

 development may be divided into two great 

 stages characterized by distinctive modes of 

 expression. The first is the prescriptorial 

 stage in which ideas are thrown into crude 

 and incongruous classes for mnemonic 

 purposes ; the second is the scriptorial stage 

 in which ideas are expressed by arbitrary 

 symbols, graphic and phonetic ; and these 

 stages are none the less veritable because 

 the transition from one to the other has 

 taken place gradually among many peoples ; 

 this transition being perhaps the most 

 sweeping and important in the whole course 

 of development of mankind. During the 

 earlier stage, in which incongruous things 

 are connoted, there has been among many 

 peoples, notablj' the various American fami- 

 lies, a custom of connoting kinship with 

 tribal law ; indeed tribal law is memorized 

 and, perpetuated largely through terms of 

 i-elative position of individuals in the 



family, in the clan or gens, and in the 

 tribe ; so that among these peoples tribal 

 law tended toward the perpetuation of kin- 

 ship systems, and remembered kinship crys- 

 tallized and perpetuated tribal law. Thus 

 the basis of prescriptorial society ever 

 smacked of nepotism and made for egoism 

 rather than altruism. But in Papagueria, 

 where the conditions led to the develop- 

 ment of an altruism transcending filial, 

 paternal and fraternal feeling, the consan- 

 guineous system seems to have weakened 

 and the system of law bound up there- 

 with seems to have dropped into desue- 

 tude, and the people seem to have risen to 

 the moral plane of civilization without 

 making the usually parallel transition 

 from the prescriptorial to the scriptorial 

 stage in the art of expression. It is im- 

 practicable now to develop this line of re- 

 search in detail ; it must suffice to note in 

 passing that the observations and inferences 

 indicate that civilization, no less than agri- 

 culture, must be reckoned among the pro- 

 ducts of the desert. 



Although in many respects antithetic to 

 the Papago, the Seri Indians are interre- 

 lated with their environment in various 

 waj'S. Seriland proper comprises a large 

 island (Tiburon, about 500 square miles in 

 area) and several islets in the Gulf of Cali- 

 fornia, with a several times larger area on 

 the adjacent mainland ; the entire tract is 

 mountainous and exceedingly arid, only one 

 feeble streamlet and a few small springs or 

 tinajas existing within it ; and it is clearly 

 set off from contiguous habitable territory 

 by a broad desert zone. From time to 

 time the Seri steal across their bounding 

 desert in predatorj' forays or for petty 

 trade, and during the early history of west- 

 ern Mexico they established nominally 

 permanent settlements so much as 75 miles 

 beyond their natural boundary ; but it has 

 been their custom, always in case of defeat 

 and commonlj' in the event of ordinarily 



