1 8 ELLIOT SMITH, Distribution of Mummification. 



should desert the strong intrenchments which the diffi- 

 culties of full and adequate explanation have afforded 

 them in the past, and take refuge behind the straw barri- 

 cades of imaginary psychological and biological analogies, 

 which they have hastily constructed for their own purposes, 

 and in flagrant defiance of all that the psychologist under- 

 stands by the phrase "working of the human mind," if 

 perchance he is ever driven to employ this expression, or 

 the meaning attached by the biologist to " evolution." 



It is not sufficient proof of my thesis, however, merely 

 to expose the hollowness of the pretensions of one's 

 opponents, nor even to show the identity of geographical 

 distribution and the linking up of customs to form the 

 " heliolithic " culture-complex. Many writers have dimly 

 realised that some such spread of culture took place, but 

 by misunderstanding the nature of the factors that came 

 into play or the chronology of the movements they were 

 discussing (see especially Macmillan Brown's [7] and 

 Enoch's [16] books, to mention the latest, but by no means 

 the worst offenders), have brought discredit upon the 

 thesis I am endeavouring to demonstrate. 



Another danger has arisen out of the revulsion against 

 Bastian's old idea of independent evolution by his fellow- 

 countrymen Frobenius, Graebner, Ankermann, Foy and 

 others, with the co-operation of the Austrian philologist, 

 Schmidt, and the Swiss ethnologist, Montandon (who has 

 summarised the views of the new school in the first part of 

 the new journal, Archives suisses d' Anthropologic generate, 

 May, 1914, p. 113); for they have rushed to the other 

 extreme, and, relying mainly upon objects of " material 

 culture," have put forward a method of analysis and 

 postulated a series of migrations for which the evidence 

 is very doubtful. Rivers (64) has pointed out the un- 

 reliability of such inferences when unchecked by the con- 



