Page:The American Indian.djvu/400

334

If now we take a comprehensive view of anthropology as a whole, we see no reason for revising the general assumption that no necessary relation exists between the known types of culture, linguistics, and somatology. Neither are certain types of linguistics associated with certain types of culture, nor certain types of somatology accompanied by special forms of culture or language. The particular combination of these which we encounter are, in the main, historical facts. Yet, we have seen that, while this is essentially true, there are ways in which these classes of data do correlate. This correlation is seen in many of our culture areas. One of the best known examples, that of the Eskimo, has been cited in a previous discussion. Here the language, culture, and somatology are all distinctly different from those in other areas. Again, in California the languages, though of many stocks, show a curious tendency to possess common distinctive characters, while the somatic type is claimed as uniform throughout. We can, therefore, safely summarize our discussion by stating that each distinct culture area tends to have distinctive characters in language and somatology. However, the reversal of this formula does not hold, for people speaking languages of the same stock do not show a tendency to common culture characters unless they occupy a single geographical area. An analogous negation holds for somatology. It seems, then, that culture is one of the primary factors in this association, and that, due to causes we have not yet perceived, both languages and somatologies are differentiated after culture's own pattern.

Our next task will be to seek out clues to the identity of these contributory causes. Early in this discussion, we saw how closely the prehistoric areas agreed with the historic, suggesting that a type of culture was in some vague manner firmly fixed in a locality. In some respects, such a conclusion is disconcerting, because the traditions of our subject call for a veritable and constant flux of migrations. While our previous