Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 15 



evidence of the reality not only of the spread of culture 

 and its carriers, but also of the ways and the means by 

 which it travelled, it will naturally be asked how it has 

 come to pass that there is even the shadow of a doubt as 

 to the migrations which distributed this *' heliolithic " cul- 

 ture-complex so widely in the world. It cannot be ex- 

 plained by lack of knowledge, for most of the facts that I 

 have enumerated are taken bodily from the anthropo- 

 logical journals of forty or more years ago. 



The explanation is to be found, I believe, in a curious 

 psychological process incidental to the intensive study of 

 an intricate problem. As knowledge increased and various 

 scholars attempted to define the means by (and the time 

 at) which the contacts of various peoples took place, diffi- 

 culties were revealed which, though really trivial, were 

 magnified into insuperable obstacles. All of these real 

 difficulties were created by mistaken ideas of the relative 

 chronology of the appearance of civilisation in various 

 centres, and especially by the failure to realise that 

 useful arts were often lost. For example, if on a certain 

 mainland A two practices, a and b — one of them, a, a 

 useful practice, say the making of pottery ; the other, b, 

 a useless custom, say the preservation of the corpse — 

 were developed, and a was at least as old, or preferably 

 definitely older than b, it seemed altogether inconceivable 

 to the ethnologist if an island B was influenced by the 

 culture of the mainland ^,at some time after the practices 

 a and b were in vogue, that it might, under any conceiv- 

 able circumstances, fail to preserve the useful art a, even 

 though it might allow the utterly useless practice b to 

 lapse. Therefore it was argued that, if the later inhabitants 

 of B mummified their dead, but did not make pottery, 

 this was clear evidence that they could not have come 

 under the influence of A. 



