!•<» iNDi \v- 01 l in. PL IIN8 



It will be noted that a mad or foolish society i- found 



in each of the six tribes a- i- also a dog society, while 



the kit-fox and the raven are common to a Dumber. 

 Investigations of these organizations have shown thai 

 though those bearing similar name- are not exact dupli- 

 cate's, they nevertheless have many fundamental ele- 

 ments in common. 



The most probable explanation of this correspon- 

 dence in name and element is that each distinct society 

 had a common origin, or that the bulls, for example, 

 were created by one tribe and then passed on to other-. 

 This is an important point because among anthropolo- 

 gists there are two extreme theories to account for 

 similarities in culture, one that all like cultural trait-. 

 wherever found, had a common origin, the other that 

 all were invented or derived independently by the 

 tribes practising them. The former is often spoken 

 of as the diffusion of cultural traits, the latter as inde- 

 pendent development. It is generally agreed, how- 

 ever, that most cultures contain traits acquired b} T 

 diffusion (or borrowing) as well as some entirely original 

 to themselves, the whole forming a complex very 

 difficult to analyze. Returning to these Plains Indian 

 societies we find among several tribes (Blackfoot, 

 Gros Ventre, Arapaho, Mandan, and Hidatsa) an 

 additional feature in that the societies enumerated in 

 our table are arranged in series so that ordinarily a man 

 passes from one to the other in order, like school children 

 in their grades, thus automatically grouping the mem- 

 bers according to age. For this variety, the term age- 



