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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII. No. 686 



mere process of divergence, continued until 

 practically aU traces of original relation- 

 ship have now become obliterated. While, 

 as has been said, there seems at present no 

 great prospect that we shall ever obtain 

 conclusive evidence as to such original 

 unity of linguistic stocks now apparently 

 unrelated, it is clear that if the processes 

 which have more recently been at work 

 dividing original stocks into distinct 

 languages, have been operative in this re- 

 gion for a considerably longer period, as 

 is only natural, there must have been some 

 such result as the gradual formation of 

 what we now call distinct families. In 

 any case nothing has ever been discovered 

 that supports the so-called fish-trap theory, 

 according to which the multiplicity of 

 languages in California is due to the suc- 

 cessive crowding, into this more desirable 

 habitat, of waves or bands of unrelated 

 immigrants from less favorable territories, 

 to which none of them were ever willing to 

 retui-n. While this theory is at once 

 simple and plausible, it has never been any- 

 thing else than purely hypothetical. 



It is still sometimes thought that areas 

 of diverse native languages can be pretty 

 closely correlated in California with areas 

 that are physiographically distinct. Noth- 

 ing is more erroneous. True, as there are 

 so many forms of speech, the great ma- 

 jority of them can extend only over a small 

 territory, and it is only natural that a 

 small territory should often be confined 

 entirely to a certain physiographical area. 

 But there are numerous instances where 

 not only linguistic families, but even 

 dialects, run counter to all natural 

 boundaries. The Shoshoneans and Washo 

 have both spilled over the high crest of 

 the Sierra Nevada. The Pomo west of the 

 main Coast Range have an offshoot in the 

 Sacramento valley, and the Wintun of this 

 valley occupy territory west of the Coast 

 Range. The Turok are in part an ocean 



people, like their neighbors the Wiyot, and 

 in part a river people on the same stream 

 as their neighbors the Karok. Shoshonean 

 people lived in the timbered Sierra, in the 

 Great Basin drainage, the hot deserts of 

 the interior of southern California, the 

 fertile parts of the coast region of southern 

 California, and shared the Santa Barbara 

 islands with the Chumash. The southern 

 Maidu dialect was spoken in the Sacra- 

 mento valley plains, in the foothills, and 

 in the high Sierra. The northern and cen- 

 tral Pomo dialects were each spoken on the 

 immediate coast, in the open Russian river 

 valley, and in the intervening heavily 

 timbered mountainous redwood belt. In 

 certain instances where languages or dia- 

 lects correspond to physiographic areas, 

 these physiographic areas lack any sepa- 

 rating barrier. Thus among the Tokuts 

 and Miwok the dialects of the level plain 

 of the San Joaquin valley are with 

 scarcely an exception quite sharply dis- 

 tinct from the dialects of the adjacent foot- 

 hill country of the Sierra; and yet the 

 change from plain to hills is so gradual in 

 some parts as to be scarcely visible. It is 

 clear that in such cases the direct cause of 

 the difference of speech is not the environ- 

 ment itself, but a difference in association 

 and mode of life dependent upon physical 

 geography. In fact it is even going too 

 far to name these dialectic divergences as 

 effects and other factors as causes; we are 

 really only justified in saying that the 

 differentiation of speech seems to be 

 causally related with other factors, and 

 that these are immediately cultural and 

 historical, and only indirectly physical and 

 environmental. 



Much the same is true of the demon- 

 strable relations of culture and environ- 

 ment. There are instances of the effect of 

 environment on culture in parts of Cali- 

 fornia, which could not well be more vivid ; 

 and yet these same instances show also the 



