et a eee 
THE ROVING IMPULSE 195 
It is interesting, we think, to inquire whether 
there may not be two kinds of nomadism. It may 
be that roving manifestations confined to early 
childhood, or to adolescence, or associated with 
marked lack of control and grip, are due to the 
outcrop of an ancestral trait, while another form 
expresses an independent variation, a new departure, 
an organismal experiment in the direction of ex- 
ploration and novelty-seeking. It is marked by 
great power of control and by resolute resistance, 
though it sways its possessors restlessly. Perhaps 
many of the great explorers and naturalist-travelers 
illustrate this type, men who cannot rest, as Nansen 
once said, until they have gone through, or tried 
to go through, every room—even the ghost-room— 
of the vast house which is theirs. 
Dr. Davenport points to the restless habits of 
the gorilla and the chimpanzee. The gorilla family 
roams about in search of food, and will rarely 
stay a couple of nights in the same shelter. We 
read that the chimpanzee never uses its sleeping 
platform a second night. Now it may be that the 
group of animals to which the ancestors of man 
belonged were typical nomads, but there seems great 
risk of fallacy when nomadism in man is likened to 
wandering that has a direct relation to food-getting 
or to periodic environmental changes. The wander- 
ing may have been initiated by variants akin to 
Yoving boys in mankind, but the impulse has beer 
tamed and incorporated into the general inheri: 
tance of the species in question, and may be ex. 
