Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/247

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 235

territories among the several tribes. When one of these tribes left the country, it ceded its hunting-ground to its neighbors. In this organization of the Murras there was already a certain complexity. There also existed certain private properties marked off, but inalienable ; for instance, the houses. However, the latter were themselves owned by one or several families, who inhabit them together, rather than by a particular individual. 3

All of the observed facts thus conspire everywhere and always to show that the external frontiers of each group are in correlation with its structure and its internal organization, as well as with the structure and composition of the surrounding groups. The strik- ing similarity of facts, institutions, and beliefs among the most opposite populations is naturally explained by the homogeneity of the existing conditions, and by the laws of adaptation to these conditions, without the necessity of taking imitation into account. Imitation, like invention, is only a derived and subordinate phe- nomenon. Both appear only as assistants of the natural con- ditions which alone render imitation and invention advantageous to the group. The same inventions arise spontaneously under like conditions. The fundamental conditions of social life every- where varying only within certain limits, as I presume to have demonstrated, the same practices, same institutions, and same beliefs are met in analogous stages of civilization, even among populations which have never been in contact with each other and which are ignorant of each other's existence.

Among hunting populations, but among such as are more mili- tary than those of which we are speaking, the frontiers, accord- ing to Waitz, 4 in the same way as the internal structure, are much more rigorously established. For instance, the frontiers of the tribes of redskins east of the Rocky Mountains could not be crossed by strangers without authority, and were bounded with great care. The soil was nominally the property of the chief of the community. It was inalienable as belonging not only to the contemporaries, but to future generations. The society, being

1 VON MARTINS, Beitrage zur Ethnographic und Sprachkunde Amerikas ; I, "Zur Ethnographic" (Leipzig, 1867).
 * Anthrofologie, Vol. Ill, p. 221.