Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/826

 796 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

lective labor by which the Toltecs ascertained the length of the solar year as 365 X days an< ^ instituted a cycle of fifty-two years at the end of which the calendar was rectified by intercalation ! Proverbs are the slow deposit of collective experience. Even the gods are evolved rather than invented. Each passes through a period of probation, and only those are finally adopted by the tribe which have established a long and brilliant record as suc- cess-bringers.

Next to these statico-dynamic processes come transmutations. They are changes of an involuntary character due to the diffi- culty one generation has in accurately reproducing the copy set by its predecessor. The speech of parents being imperfectly imitated by their children, there results that accumulation of minute unnoticed changes which is described by the Law of Trans- mutation of vowels and consonants. Refracted through succes- sive scribes, pictographs drift into conventional ideographic characters. Natural gestures and actions become fossilized into meaningless forms. Metaphors cease, after a few generations, to call up images of objects or actions. Coins cast at first as minia- ture spades or knives drift into unrecognizable shapes. An epithet of a deity comes finally to designate a new deity distinct from the old. The unconscious logic of the mind metamorphoses a god of the soil, first into a god of rain, and then into a god of thunder and lightning.

Institutions and relations likewise glide insensibly into forms that would not consciously be assumed. Presents freely given to a chief pass into presents expected and finally demanded, while volunteered help passes into exacted service. Among the Greeks there was "a gradual transition from the primitive idea of a personal goddess, Themis, attached to Zeus, first to his sentences or orders called Themistes, and next by a still farther remove to various established customs which these sentences were believed to sanctify." The most common and convenient article of wealth gradually establishes itself as a medium of exchange. Bank-notes, issued as certificates of deposit of coin and redeemable on demand, come at last to be looked upon as