Page:The American Indian.djvu/399

Rh relations, but rather of long social contact. Our point is that the languages of a culture area, even when regarded as of independent stocks, still show a grouping that tends to be coincident with that for cultural characters. It is a reasonable expectation that a distribution of phonetic types alone would show a similar correspondence. The peculiar point is, however, that the unity is in the stock affiliation and not in practical speech, for the linguistic differentiation within a stock is often very great. Neither is there political unity, and it may be doubted if the latter can long exist without the other. The suggestion is, therefore, that the similarities of languages within a geographical, or culture area, are due to the expansion of the early parent stocks within their habitats, and to the long association made possible thereby.

We may now turn to the somatic classification of American aborigines. Again, we have a truism that no correlations are to be found with culture and language. Yet, our previous discussion of somatic classifications indicated a kind of agreement in-so-far that each culture area manifested some somatic unity, or that the geographical distribution of somatic types is generally coincident with culture distribution. Under that head it was suggested that this could be expected if the population were fairly stable, since sexual and culture contacts are largely simultaneous. As to linguistic correlations, it follows that wherever agreements are found between language and culture, there also may be expected agreements in somatic type. A fine example of this is to be found in the Eskimo, where culture, language, and somatic type are equally distinct from other parts of the continent. On the other hand, we find cases where a stock language is found in more than one culture area, and again, other cases in which the somatic type has spread into neighboring areas. Hence, we are dealing with three independent groups of human phenomena, each of which tends toward the same geographical centers.