Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/176

 l62 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the fact that the mind employs the principle of abstraction — sees general principles behind details — and that the precise detail with which the process of abstraction begins cannot in all cases be posited or determined. Thus the use of poison was certainly- suggested to man by the occurrence of poison in nature, and in some crisis it occurred to man to use poison for the purpose of killing. And since the snake is the most conspicuous user of poison in nature it has usually been said that man gets his idea from the snake, and that the poisoned arrow-point is copied from the tooth of the poisonous snake. I have no doubt that this thing frequently happened in this way, but there are also various other poisons in nature. The deadly curare with which the Guiana Indian tips his tiny arrow is a vegetable product. The Bushmen use animal, vegetable, and mineral poisons, and a mix- ture of all of them, and the Hottentots manufacture poisons from the entrails of certain insects and from putrifying flesh. In short, assuming poison in nature and the arrow in the hands of man, we can assume the development of a poisoned arrow- point even if there had been no such thing as an envenomed serpent's tooth.

Neither can we look too curiously into the order of emer- gence of inventions nor assume a straight and uniform line of development among all the races. There have been serious attempts to determine what was the first weapon used by man. Was it a round stone, a sharp-pointed stone, a sharp-edged stone, or a stick? But all we can really assume is prehensity and the general idea. The first weapon used was the object at hand when the idea occurred to man. Or, having any one of these objects in his hand, it used itself, so to speak, and the accident was afterward imitated.

The attempt to classify culture by epochs is similarly doomed to failure when made too absolutely. The f rugivorous, the hunt- ing, the pastoral, and the agricultural are the stages usually assumed. But the Indian was a hunter while his squaw was an agriculturist. The African is pastoral, agricultural, or hunting indifferently, without regard to his cultural status. And the ancient Mexicans were agricultural but had never had a pastoral