Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/77

Rh the patriarch who is saved in it—arose independently in western Asia, in Mexico, and in South America, as well as in many intervening places, alike even in details, and yet neither borrowed one from the other nor yet drawn from a common source. But until he understands this he has not caught up with the progress of ethnologic science.

So it is also with the motives of primitive art, be they symbolic or merely decorative. How many volumes have been written tracing the migrations and connections of nations by the distribution of some art motive, say the svastika, the meander, or the cross! And how little of value is left in all such speculations by the rigid analysis of primitive arts that we see in such works as Dr. Grosse's Anfänge der Kunst, or Dr. Haddon's attractive monograph on the Decorative Art of British New Guinea, published last year! The latter sums up in these few and decisive words the result of such researches pursued on strictly inductive lines: "The same processes operate on the art of decoration, whatever the subject, wherever the country, whenever the age." This is equally true of the myth and the folk tale, of the symbol and the legend, of the religious ritual and the musical scale.

I have even attempted, 1 hope not rashly, to show that there are quite a number of important words, in languages nowise related by origin and contact, which are phonetically the same or similar, not of the mimetic class, but arising from certain common relations of the physiological function of language; and I have urged that words of this class should not be accounted of value in studying the affiliations of language.

And I have also endeavored to demonstrate that the sacredness which we observe attached to certain numbers, and the same numbers, in so many mythologies and customs the world over, is neither fortuitous nor borrowed the one from the other, but depends on fixed relations which the human body bears to its surroundings, and the human mind to the laws of its own activity; and therefore that all such coincidences and their consequences—and it is surprising how far-reaching these are—do not belong to the similarities which reveal contact, but only to those which testify to psychical unity.

So numerous and so amazing have these examples of culture identities become of late years that they have led more than one student of ethnology into a denial of the freedom of the human will under any of the definitions of voluntary action. But the aims of ethnology are not so aspiring. It is strictly a natural science, dealing with outward things—to wit, the expressions of man's psychical life, endeavoring to ascertain the conditions of their appearance and disappearance, the organic laws of their birth, growth, and decay. These laws must undoubtedly be