932 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XV. No. 389. 



ages, and yet with brief opportunity they 

 were able to adopt and even to improve 

 upon the ancient cultures of the Mediter- 

 ranean countries. Civilization is not an 

 inherent but merely a potential character, 

 more easily lost than gained, and in its 

 earlier stages readily influenced by facts 

 and conditions as truly biological as those 

 which have conduced to the upbuilding of 

 the even more specialized organization of 

 the social ants and termites. 



On this ground we may also disregard 

 the opinion general among ethnologists 

 and historians that the pastoral stage with 

 which the civilization of the Mediterra- 

 nean region was supposed to have begun 

 was merged gradually and spontaneoiisly 

 into the agricultural. Primitive pastoral 

 tribes are everjnvhere more or less no- 

 madic, and pastoral prosperity does not 

 conduce to a more settled existence, but 

 makes necessary a wider range of feeding 

 grounds, so that we should need to imagine 

 the semi-savage shepherd planting and 

 fencing plots of millet, barley or beans 

 with the intention of experimenting upon 

 new vegetable foods. But such an idea is 

 so absurdly inconsistent with the instinct- 

 ive conservatism of man's food habits that 

 we can but believe that the pastoral natives 

 of the Mediterranean region built civiliza- 

 tions only when brought into synthesis with 

 other peoples who had made independent 

 progress on agricultural lines. 



Predatorj^, nomadic and pastoral peo- 

 ples may develop excellent physical and 

 mental powers, but the primary condition 

 for the genesis of civilization is the settled 

 social organization of an agricultural com- 

 munity. That agricultural habits of life 

 conduce to civilization even among rela- 

 tively inferior tribes is well shown in the 

 numerous centers of ancient primitive cul- 

 ture developed in the tropics of the Amer- 

 ican continent. Ethnologists have decided 

 that all this diversity of incipient civiliza- 



tions was " truly indigenous and not im- 

 ported, as formerly suspected on the 

 ground of many racial and cultural resem- 

 blances with the peoples of eastern Asia. 

 This opinion is further supported by the 

 biological fact that of the many plants 

 cultivated in ancient America only the ba- 

 nana appears to be exotic, and this prob- 

 ably arrived not many centuries before 

 the coming of Europeans. 



The American origin of agricultural 

 man in no way conflicts with an Old 

 World origin for zoological and geological 

 man, though these questions are often con- 

 fused by ethnological writers. Such cul- 

 tural tendencies as may have existed in 

 the Mediterranean region before the arri- 

 val of agricultural influences from Amer- 

 ica appear to have been confined to the 

 domestication of animals as the basis of a 

 diet largely carnivorous. The aborigines 

 of the island of Palma in the Canary 

 group had four domestic animals and no 

 domestic plants. The predication of inde- 

 pendent agricultural beginnings in the 

 Old World is rendered unnecessary by two 

 facts long well known though strangely 

 neglected ; first, that the tropics of the Old 

 World from Hawaii and Easter Island to 

 Madagascar and Sierra Leone were over- 

 run by a single primitive, agricultural, 

 seafai'ing race; and, second, that this race 

 was in possession of numerous cultivated 

 plants of American origin. To infer from 

 these facts that the Polynesians, Malays or 

 Chinese came from America would be to 

 ignore the probability that the trans-Pa- 

 cific migration of this primitive culture 

 race took place long anterior to the forma- 

 tion of existing peoples and languages. 

 The identity of the tropical cultivated 

 plants, several of which are propagated 

 only by cuttings, renders gratuitous all 

 objections on the score of distances and 

 difSculties of communication, and the ra- 

 cial and cultural similarities of the peoples 



