Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/175

 INTERPRETATION OF SAVAGE SOCIETY i6i

large boat might have been suggested in time of floods, when houses floated down the rivers before the eyes of men. I think that even the eminent ethnologists Mason and McGee err in this respect when they suggest the one that "the hawks taught men to catch fish, the spiders and caterpillars to spin, the hornet to make paper, and the cray-fish to work in clay" (see infra p. 35), and the other that plants and animals were first domesticated in the desert rather than in humid areas, because in unwatered regions plants, animals, and men were in need of one another and showed a greater tolerance and helpfulness (see infra pp. 66, 73). In fact a variorum edition of the theories of the origins of culture would be as interesting as Mr. Fumess' variorum edi- tion of Hamlet, which, while it was not, I believe, prepared with that in view, is yet one of our great storehouses of amusement.

Some of these theories are simply imaginative and absurd, and others are illustrations of the too particularistic. Doubtless milk is a very precious possession, but so also is iron. No race ever attained a considerable level of culture in the absence of iron. And it would be possible to name a number of things which races of high culture possess and races of low culture do not possess. The idea of crushing, pounding, and rubbing is much too general to warrant us in saying that the idea of the mill is derived from the human mouth. When man has once a floating log, bark boat, or raft, he can enlarge it without assist- ance from floating houses. The growth of plant life and the idea of particular attention to it are too general to depend on any particular kind of accident, or on a desert environment. Ani- mals follow the camp for food, they are caught alive in traps, and the young ones are kept as pets; and this would happen if there were no desert regions. Two of Herbert Spencer's great and gross errors of this character — ^the derivation of all the learned and artistic occupations (even that of the dancer) from the medicine-man, and the assumption that ghost-worship is the origin of all spirit belief and worship (even of the worship of animals and plants) I have considered in Parts II and VI of this volume.

The error of the particularistic method lies in overlooking