Page:The disappearance of useful arts.djvu/19

123 an immigrant people. The contact of two peoples has social consequences of a complicated character in which elements of the material culture may be involved. It is unlikely that immigrant influence would ever lead people to discard such useful objects as pottery and the canoe, but it is probable that it has played a part in the disuse of the bow and arrow in Melanesia. It is even possible that the change of fashion I have supposed to have occurred in Polynesia may have been connected with the presence of a new ethnic element in the population.

RELIGIOUS AND MAGICAL FACTORS.

In the last section I have suggested that religious factors may have assisted the development of the club in Polynesia and thus helped to bring about the disappearance of the bow and arrow as a weapon. There is another religious factor which may have worked in the same direction. People whose highest hope it is to die in battle, to whom this end opens the way to a future life in a special paradise, are not likely to be swayed by utilitarian motives in their choice of weapons. If the bow and arrow had a great superiority as a weapon, and if war were waged in earnest, we could have trusted to natural selection to ensure its survival, but in the absence of such superiority, the Polynesian contempt for death may have had a share in its disappearance.

It is also possible that religious or magical motives may have assisted the loss of useful arts dependent upon the dying out of special craftsmen. To our utilitarian minds there may seem to be a serious objection to the view that useful arts have disappeared through the dying out of craftsmen. We can readily understand how such a factor would produce a great falling off in workmanship and ornamentation, but from our point of view it would seem most unlikely that people would stand idly by and allow the