Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/486

 mcgee] the trend of HUMAN PROGRESS 4 2 7

strength of ancient Anteus, is constantly renewed by contact with nature ; the knowledge in which the power is stored up is never lost save in the extinction of entire groups or in the death of the recluse, the robber of his kind, but is only brightened and purified and multiplied by exchange and carried forward by the generations of men with cumulative rapidity ; and as the genera- tions arise and mingle and pass away, this noblest of heritages increases and spreads from tribe to tribe, from nation to nation, and from continent to continent, ever unifying mankind, ever dominating lower nature.

The postulates concerning the organs and functions of mind seem to elucidate a much mooted problem in ethnology : Many investigators have been impressed by the similarity in mental operations displayed by unrelated peoples, perhaps inhabiting separate continents, and have been led thereby to infer that the peoples were of common ancestry ; Israelite and Indian, Egyptian and Yucatecan, Polynesian and Peruvian, Malayan and Mexican, have more than once been combined on the supposed evidence offered by similarities in activital products or in the activities themselves ; world-wide symbols like the swastika have been held to establish the genetic unity of the human genus ; and through subconscious ratiocination nearly all thinkers have integrated their experiences, howsoever limited, into an intuitive hypothesis that all men sprang from a single pair. During two decades expert anthropologists have been engaged in rectifying the real and assumed data for this hypothesis ; Powell began by explaining the origin of activital similarities (or activital coincidences) ; Brinton and others have insisted that any two minds must be expected to respond similarly to similar stimuli ; British anthro- pologists half deride and half accept this teaching as the "Ameri- can Monroe doctrine of anthropology"; while different students have tacitly or openly accepted the view that minds, whereso- ever placed, must develop along essentially parallel or converging

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