Chapter III: The Struggle for Existence (1)

TOOLS, ARTS, LANGUAGE, MONEY

Processes and artifacts of the food supply.--Fishing.--Methods
of fishing.--The mystic element.--Religion and industry.--
Artifacts and freaks of nature.--Forms of stone axes.--How
stone implements are made.--How arrowheads are made.--How stone
axes are used.--Acculturation or parallelism.--Fire-making
tools.--Psychophysical traits of primitive man.--Language.--
Language and magic.--Language is a case of folkways.--Primitive
dialects.--Taking up and dropping language.--Pigeon dialects.--
How languages grow.--Money.--Intergroup and intragroup money.--
Predominant wares.--Intragroup money from property; intergroup
money from trade.--Shell and bead money.--Token money.--
Selection of a predominant ware.--Stone money in Melanesia.--
Plutocratic effects of money.--Money on the northwest coast of
North America.--Wampumpeag and roanoke.--Ring money. Use of
metal.--The evolution of money.--The ethical functions of
money.

+122. Processes and artifacts of the food supply.+ The processes and the artifacts which are connected with food supply offer us the purest and simplest illustrations of the development of folkways. They are not free from the admixture of superstition and vanity, but the element of expediency predominates in them. It is reported of the natives of New South Wales that a man will lie on a rock with a piece of fish in his hand, feigning sleep. A hawk or crow darts at the fish, but is caught by the man. It is also reported of Australians that a man swims under water, breathing through a reed, approaches ducks, pulls one under water by the legs, wrings its neck, and so secures a number of them.[165] If these stories can be accepted with confidence, they may well furnish us a starting point for a study of the art of catching animals. The man really has no tool, but must rely entirely on his own quickness and dexterity. Birdlime is a device for which many plants furnish material,[166] and which is available even against large game, which is fretted and worn out by it until it becomes the prey of man. A Botocudo hunter grates the eggs of an alligator together, when he finds them on the bank, and so entices the mother.[167] The Yuroks of California sprinkled berries on the shallow bottom of a river and stretched a net a few inches below the surface of the water. Ducks diving for the berries were caught by the neck in the meshes and drowned. As they hung quiet they did not frighten away others.[168] The Tarahumari catch birds by stringing corn kernels on a fiber which is buried underground. The bird swallows the corn and cannot eject it.[169] Various animals were trained to help man in the food quest and were thus drawn into the industrial organization. The animals furnished materials (skin, bone, teeth, hair, horns) and also tools, so that the food quest broadened beyond the immediate supply of food into mechanical industrial forms. The Shingu Indians, although they lived on the product of the ground, were obliged to continue the chase because of the materials and implements which they got from the animals. They used the jaw of a fish, with the teeth in it, as a knife; the arm and leg bones of apes as arrow points; the tail spike of a skate for the same; the two front claws of the armadillo to dig the ground (a process which the animal taught them by the same use of his claws); the shell of a river mussel as a scraper to finish wooden tools. "These people were hunters without dogs, fishers without hooks, and tillers without plow or spade. They show how much development life was capable of in the time before metals."[170] The palometa is a fish which weighs two or three pounds. It has fourteen teeth in each jaw so sharp that the Abipones shear sheep with the jaw.[171] Such cases might be pursued into great detail. They show acute observation, great ingenuity, clever adaptation, and teachableness. The lasso, bola, boomerang, and throw knife, as well as the throw stick, are products of persistent and open-minded experience. The selection and adaptation of things in nature to a special operation in the arts often show ingenuity as great as that manifested in any of our devices.[172] This ingenuity is of the same kind as that shown by many animals. Intelligent experiment, however, is not wanting. It is reported of Eskimo that they invent imaginary hard cases, such as might occur to them, and, by way of sport, discuss the proper way to deal with the case.[173] Operations similar to this in play show a mode in which ingenuity must have been developed and inventions produced. In the higher grades of the hunting stage, such as are presented by the North American Indians, buffalo hunting, for instance, calls for the highest organization and skill, and establishes inflexible discipline.[174]

+123. Fishing.+ Fishing furnishes a parallel case. A Thlinkit fisherman puts on a cap which resembles the head of a seal, and hiding his body between the rocks makes a noise like a seal. This entices seals towards him and gives him opportunity to kill them.[175] The Australians had a fish spear and a net made of fibers, which were chewed by the women to make them soft. They had no hooks until they got them from the whites.[176] Weirs for fishing were built of stone. One is described which was a labyrinth of stone circles, of which some were connected with each other. The walls are three or four feet high. The fish get confused and are caught by hand.[177] Remains of weirs, consisting of wattled work of reeds or saplings, are found in the rivers of northern Europe. The device of putting into the water some poisonous or narcotic substance in order to stupefy the fish is met with all over the globe. It was employed by the aborigines on Lanzarote (Canary Islands). There the fish were freshened in unpoisoned waters.[178] It is quite impossible that this device should have spread only by contact. It must have been independently invented. It secured a large amount of fish with very little trouble. The Ainos dam the stream, leaving only a few openings, opposite each of which, below, they build a platform. The fish jump at the opening, but some miss it and fall on the platform where they are caught.[179] The Polynesians depend largely on fish for their food supply. They had nets a thousand ells long, which could be handled only by a hundred men. They made hooks of shell, bone, and hard wood.[180] The first fishhooks of prehistoric men in Europe and North America were made of pieces of bone pointed at both ends, the cord being attached in the middle.[181] The Shingu Indians fished with bow and arrow, nets, scoop baskets, and weirs. Bait was used to make the fish rise. Then they were shot with an arrow. The people had no hooks, but eagerly adopted them when they became acquainted with them.[182] They and other Brazilians set a long cylindrical basket in a stream in such a way that when the fish enters it and seizes the bait, it tilts up into a perpendicular position. The fish cannot then get out.[183]

+124. Methods of fishing.+ Nilsson remarks on the astonishing resemblance between all the fishing apparatus of Scandinavians, Eskimo, and North Americans.[184] The problem is solved in the same way, but the materials within reach impose limiting conditions. The rod and hook yield to the net when the fish are plentiful. Then, however, the spear also is used. It is sometimes made so that the head will come off when the fish is struck. By its buoyancy the spearhead, sticking in the body of the fish, compels it to rise, when it is caught.[185] A peculiar device is reported from Dobu, New Guinea. A string long enough to reach to the ground is fastened to a kite. At the end of the string is a tassel of spider's web. The kite is held at such a height that the tassel just skims the water. The fish catching at it entangles its teeth in the spider's-web tassel and is caught.[186] The Chinese have trained cormorants to do their fishing for them.

+125. The mystic element.+ Although the food quest is the most utilitarian and matter-of-fact branch of the struggle for existence, the mystic element does not fail to present itself. No doubt it would be found interwoven with many of the cases mentioned above, if the question was raised and the investigation made. In the Caroline archipelago fishing is combined with various rites and religious notions. The chief medicine man owes the authority of his position, not to his knowledge of the art of fishing, but to his knowledge of the formulæ of incantation and exorcism employed in fishing. There must be abstinence from the sex relation before a fishing expedition. The men start in silence. Especially, the hoped-for success must not be mentioned. The boat must have a formula of luck pronounced over it. Sacrifices of taro are offered to win the favor of the god, lest the lines be broken by sharks or become entangled in rocks. If the expedition fails to get a good catch, the fault is laid to the men. Some one of them is thought to have done something amiss.[187]

+126. Religion and industry.+ Here we meet with a familiar cycle of notions and usages. We must assume them in all cases, whether they are reported or not, for the element of supernatural intervention, or magic, seems never to be wanting. At higher stages it gives way to religious ritual or to priestly blessing. The Japanese sword maker formerly wore a priestly garb when making a sword, which was a sacred craft. He also practiced a purificatory ritual. The sacred rope of rice straw, the oldest symbol of Shinto, was suspended before the smithy. The workman's food was all cooked with holy fire, and none of his family might enter the workshop or speak to him while he was at work.[188] There were also ascetic practices in the Shinto religion, which an elected representative of the community undertook each year for the prosperity of the whole.[189] There is never a case of authority in human society which does not go back, for its origin and explanation, to the influence of the other world (ghosts, etc.) over this world.

+127. Artifacts and freaks of nature.+ In the Oxford University museum may be seen a case full of natural stones, flints, etc., so like the artifacts of the Chellean type that it would require a skilled observer to determine whether they are artificial or not. The collection includes apparent celts, rings, perforated stones, borers, scrapers, and flint flakes, so that the objects are by no means such as would lie at the beginning of the series of artifacts, in regard to which the doubt whether they were artificial would arise from their rudeness and consequent resemblance to stones broken by natural conjunctures. In the museum at Dresden may be seen a collection of stones, natural products, which might serve as models for artificial axes, celts, etc. One object shows the possibility of freaks of nature of this class. It is a water-worn stone which might be taken for a skull. In the Copenhagen museum is a great collection of stone tools arranged in sequence of perfection, beginning with the coarsest and rudest and advancing to the highest products of art of this kind. That collection is arranged solely with reference to the development of the flint and stone implements as tools for a certain use. The sequence is very convincing as to the interpretation put on the objects, and also as to the strain towards improvement. Time and place are disregarded in the arrangement. The earliest specimens in the series are very rude, and only expert opinion could justify their place amongst artifacts. It reminds us of what we are told about specimens of Australian "tomahawks." It is said of such a weapon from West Australia that if it was "found anywhere divested of the gum and handle, it is doubtful whether it could be recognized by any one as a work of art. It is ruder in its fashioning, owing principally to the material of which it is composed, than even the rude, unrubbed, chipped cutting-stones of the Tasmanians."[190] With regard to these stone implements of the Tasmanians Tylor said that some of them are "ruder in make than those of the mammoth period, inasmuch as their edges are formed by chipping only one surface of the stone, instead of both, as in the European examples." The Tasmanians, when they needed a cutting implement, caught up a suitable flat stone, knocked off chips from one side, partly or all around the edge, and used it without more ado. This they did under the eyes of modern Europeans. Tylor showed, "from among flint instruments and flakes from the cave of le Moustier in Dordogne, specimens corresponding in make with such curious exactness to those of the Tasmanians that, were they not chipped from different stones, it would hardly be possible to distinguish those of recent savages from those of European cavemen. It is not strange that experienced archæologists should have been at first inclined to consider a large portion of the Tasmanian stone implements exhibited as wasters and flakes, or chips, struck off in shaping implements." These stones had no handle. They were grasped in the hand.[191] In the Oxford museum may be seen side by side flint shapes from St. Acheul, Tasmania, India, and the Cape of Good Hope: All the paleolithic implements which we possess, even the oldest and rudest, belong far on in a series of which the antecedent members are wanting, for the art, if recognized, is seen to be advanced and artistic.[192] The Seri of southern California use a natural cobblestone, which is shaped only by the wear of use, and is discarded when sharp edges are produced by use or fracture. They use their teeth and claws like beasts. They have not a knife-sense and need training before they can use a knife. The stone selected is of an ovoid form somewhat flattened. By use it is battered on the ends and ground on the sides so that it becomes personal property and acquires fetishistic import. It is buried with the corpse of the woman who owned and used it.[193] Holmes, after experimenting with the manufacture of stone implements, declared that "every implement resembling the final forms and every blade-shaped projectile point made from a bowlder, or similar bit of rock, not already approximate in shape, must pass through the same or very nearly the same, stages of development, leaving the same wasters, whether shaped to-day, yesterday, or a million years ago; whether in the hands of the civilized, the barbarous, or the savage man."[194] This conclusion is very important, for it recognizes a certain constant determination of the art of stone-implement making by the qualities of the material and the muscular activities of man. It has been disputed whether the form called "turtle-backs" were one form in the series of artifacts, or a misform produced by errors in manufacture. "The American archæologists, who have labored long to repeat the processes of the aborigines in stone work, find themselves unavoidably making 'turtle-backs,' when they are really trying to make the leaf-shaped blade."[195] The handicraftsmen of the Smithsonian Institute have not been able to make a leaf-shaped blade such as may be seen in the museums, and no Indian has been found who could make one. "This is one of the lost arts."[196] Other pieces of rude form have been set aside as chips, or rejects, but such are found in use as scrapers, or in handles, and are to be recognized as products which belong to the series.[197] Some rude implements found in the hill gravels of Berkshire, England, have been offered as anterior to the paleolithic implements as usually classified.[198] Lubbock said that he could not find in the large Scandinavian collections "a single specimen of a true paleolithic type."[199]

+128. Forms of stone axes.+ Stone axes are found all over the globe. Chipped, sharpened, polished, grooved, pierced, handled, are different kinds which may be set in a series of advancing improvement, and under each grade local varieties may be distinguished, but the art is essentially the same everywhere. "Probably no discovery is older than the fact that friction would wear away wood or bone, or even stone."[200] It was also learned that rawhide and sinew shrank in drying, and this fact was very ingeniously used to attach handles, the sinew or membrane being put on while fresh and wet. American stone axes are grooved to receive a handle made by an ingenious adaptation of roots and branches with pitch or bitumen. "Bored stone axes are found in the tropical regions of America. Although they are very rare, they are well executed."[201] The device of boring stone axes appears at the end of the stone age in the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Perhaps they were only decorative.[202] The Polynesians used stone axes which were polished but not bored or grooved, and the edge was not curved.[203] The Pacific islanders clung to the type of the adze, so that even when they got iron and steel implements from the whites they preferred the knife of a plane to an ax, because the former could be used adze-fashion.[204] In the stone graves of Tennessee have been found implements superior to all others found in the United States in size, variety, and workmanship. Amongst these are a flint sickle-shaped tool, axes a foot long or more, a flint sword twenty-two inches long, a flint needle eight inches long; also objects supposed to be for ceremonial or decorative use. Stone axes with handles all in one piece have been found in Tennessee, Arkansas, and South Carolina.[205]

+129. How stone implements are made.+ What was the process by which these stone implements were made? The artifacts bear witness directly to two or three different operations, separate or combined, and to a great development of the process. As above stated, Tasmanians, after they became known to Europeans, made stone implements as they needed them, giving to a stone a rude adaptation to the purpose by chipping off a few flakes. Short sharp blows were struck by one stone upon another. The blow must, however, fall upon just the right spot or it would not produce the desired result. Therefore the flakes were often thrown off by pressure. A stick or horn was set against the spot where the force should be applied, and braced against the breast of the operator, while he held the stone between his feet. This latter operation is described as used by the Mexicans to get flakes of obsidian.[206] By carrying further the process of chipping or pressing the stone could be shaped more perfectly, and by rubbing it on another stone it could be given a cutting edge. The rubbing process could also be applied to the surface to make it smooth instead of leaving it as it was after the flaking process. The processes of striking and pressing were also combined. The pebble was broken by blows and the pieces were further reduced to shape by the pressing process. Different devices were also invented for holding the stone securely and in the proper position. Skill and judgment in perceiving how and for what purpose each pebble could best be treated was developed by the workers, and division of labor arose amongst them as some acquired greater skill in one operation and others in another. The operations of pressing and striking were also made complex in order to accomplish what was desired. A sapling was cut off so that the stump of a limb was left at the bottom of it. It was set against the spot where the force was needed, and a blow struck in the crotch of the limb caused the chip to fly. This apparatus was improved and refined by putting a horn tip on the end point of contact. Another device was to cut a notch in a tree trunk, which could be used as a fulcrum. A long lever was used to apply the pressure to the stone laid at the root of the tree, or on the horizontal space at the bottom of the notch.[207] These variations show persistent endeavor to get control of the necessary force and to apply it at the proper point with the least chance for error and loss. Buckley reported about the "tomahawks" of the aborigines of Victoria, that the stone was split into pieces, without regard to their shape, but of convenient thickness. A piece was rubbed on rough granite until "it is brought to a very fine thin edge, and so hard and sharp as to enable them to fell a very large tree with it." The handles are "thick pieces of wood, split and then doubled up, the stone being in the bend and fixed with gum, very carefully prepared for the purpose, so as to make it perfectly secure when bound round with sinews."[208] The natives of the Admiralty Islands use obsidian which is dug from layers in the ground. Only a few know the art of making axes, and they prosecute it as a means of livelihood. Skill is required especially to judge of the way in which the stone will split. The only tool is a stone with which light, sharp blows are struck.[209] The axes of the Swiss lake dwellings were made from bowlders of any hard stone. By means of a saw of flint set in wood, with sand and water, a groove was cut on one side and then on the other. With a single blow from another stone the bowlder was made to fall in two. By means of a hard stone the piece was rudely shaped and then finished by friction. A modern student has made such an ax in this way in five hours. Sometimes the stone was set in a handle of wood or horn.[210] It will be noticed that this process was not possible until an auxiliary tool, the flint saw, had already been made. The tools and processes were all rude and great skill and dexterity were required in the operator. "Lafitau says the polishing of a stone ax requires generations to complete. Mr. Joseph D. McGuire fabricates a grooved jade ax from an entirely rough spall in less than a hundred hours."[211]

+130. How arrowheads are made.+ As to arrowheads, "there are a dozen or more authentic reports by eye-witnesses of the manufacture of arrowheads in as many different ways."[212] The California Indians broke up a piece of flint or obsidian to the proper-sized pieces. A piece was held in the left hand, which was protected by a piece of buckskin. Pressure was put upon the edge by a piece of a deer's antler, four to six inches long, held in the right hand. In this way little pieces were chipped off until the arrowhead was formed. Only the most expert do this successfully.[213] Sometimes the stone to be operated on is heated in the fire, and slowly cooled, which causes it to split in flakes. A flake is then shaped with buck-horn pincers, tied together at the point with a thong.[214] In another report it is the stone with which the operation is performed which is said to be heated.[215] In a pit several hundred flint implements were found stored away in regular layers with alternate layers of sand between. Perhaps the purpose was to render them more easy to work to the desired finish.[216] Catlin describes another process of making arrowheads which required two workmen. One held the stone in his left hand and placed a chisel-like instrument at the proper point. The second man struck the blow. Both sang during the operation. The blows were in the rhythm of the music, and a quick "rebounding" stroke was said to be essential to good success.[217] A "lad" in Michigan made arrowheads in imitation of Indian work, from flint, glass, and obsidian, with a piece of oak stick five inches long as a tool.[218] Sophus Müller[219] says of modern attempts to imitate stone-implement making that an average workman can learn in fourteen days to make five hundred to eight hundred arrowheads per day, but that no one of the best workmen has been able to equal the fine chipping on the neolithic stone weapons, although many have made the small implements on the types of the old stone age.

+131. How stone axes were used.+ After stone axes were made it required no little independent sense to use them for the desired result. A modern archæologist used a stone ax of gray flint, with an edge six and a half centimeters long, set in a handle after the prehistoric fashion, to cut sticks of green fir, in order to test the ax. He held the stick upright and chopped into it notchwise until he could break it in two. He cut in two a stick eighteen centimeters in diameter in eighteen minutes. He struck fifteen hundred and seventy-eight cuts. At the fourteen hundred and eighty-fifth cut a piece flew from his ax.[220] A modern investigator made a polished ax in eleven hours and forty-five minutes. He cut down an oak tree 0.73 meter in circumference, with twenty-two hundred blows of the ax, in an hour and thirteen minutes.[221] When primitive men desired to cut down a tree, fire was applied to it and the ax was used only to chop off the charred wood so that the fire would attack the wood again. Canoes were hollowed out of tree trunks by the same process. These processes are reported from different parts of the world remote from each other.[222] Without these auxiliary devices the stone ax can really be used only as a hammer, for, by means of it, the wood is beaten into a fibrous condition and is not properly cut.[223] Nevertheless, the Shingu Indians cleared forests, built houses and canoes, and made furniture with the stone ax alone.[224] The Indians of Guiana, with stone and bone implements, cut down big trees, cut out the core of them, and made weapons and tools of great perfection and beauty.[225] The same may be said of very many other peoples. Some Australians value stone axes so much that they except them from the custom to bury all a man's property with him. Axes are inherited by the next of kin.[226]

+132. Acculturation versus parallelism.+ The facts in regard to making and using stone implements bring up the question whether such arts have a single origin and are spread by contagion (acculturation), or are invented independently by many people who have the same tasks to perform, and the same or similar materials at hand (parallelism). Lippert[227] says that "the different modes of fashioning flint arrowheads show us that we must not think of the earliest art as all tied to a single tradition, and carried away from this. On the contrary, human ingenuity has set about accomplishing the acts which are necessary for the struggle for existence in different places, with the elements there at hand." We have seen above that the materials may, from their character, so limit and condition the operations of manufacture as to set lines for the development of the art. If the processes of the men are also limited and conditioned by the nature of human nerves and muscles so that they must run on certain lines, it would follow that the human mind also, in face of a certain problem, will fall into conditioned modes of activity, and we should approach the doctrine that men must think the same thoughts by way of mental reaction on the same experiences and observations.

The facts, however, show that an art, beginning in the rudest way, is produced along lines of concurrent effort, and is the common property of the group. All practice it as it is, and all are unconsciously coöperating to improve it. The processes are folkways. The artifacts are tools and weapons which, by their utility, modify the folkways and become components in them. The skill, dexterity, patience, ingenuity, and power of combination which result are wider and higher possessions which also modify the folkways at later stages of effort. The generalizations of truth and right widen at every stage, and produce a theory of welfare, which must be recognized as such, no matter how rude it may be. It consists in the application of the notions of goblinism as they are prevalent at the time in the group. The art itself is built up by folkways according to their character as everywhere exhibited, for arts are modes of providing for human necessities by processes and devices which can be universally taught, and can be handed down forever. The arts of an isolated group run against limits, even if the group has great ingenuity, as we see in the case of China. It is when arts are developed by give and take between groups that they reach their highest development. The wider the area over which the coöperation and combination are active, the higher will be the achievements. "Every art is born out of the intelligence of its age."[228] It has been mentioned above that Polynesians cannot use an ax. They want to set the blade transverse to the handle. The negroes of the Niger Protectorate are very clumsy at going up or down stairs. It is a dexterity, not to say an art, which they have had no chance to acquire. They also find it very difficult to understand or interpret a picture, even of the least conventional kind.[229] The Seri of Tiburon Island have not the knife habit. They draw a knife towards the body instead of pushing it away.[230] Hence we see that the lack of a habit, or lack of opportunity to see a dexterity practiced, constitutes a narrowing of the mental horizon.

+133. Fire-making tools.+ Another art which would offer us parallel phenomena to that of stone working is that of fire making. It must have had several independent centers of origin. It existed all over the globe. Its ultimate origin is unknown to us. It may have originated in different ways at different centers. The simplest instruments for making fire can be classified according to the mode of movement employed in them as drilling, plowing, and sawing instruments. The fire drills have also undergone very important development and improvement, so that they have become very complicated machines. The ingenuity and inventive skill which were required to make a fire drill which was driven by a bow were as great as the same powers when manifested by an Edison or a Bessemer.

+134. Psychophysical traits of primitive men.+ All the artifacts were made and all the arts were produced by the concurrent efforts of men to serve their interests. We find that primitive men put patient effort and astonishing ingenuity into their tools. They also attained to great skill in the use of clumsy tools. It is true, in general, of primitive men that they shirk all prolonged effort or patient application, but they do use great patience and perseverance when they expect to accomplish something of great importance to their interests. The same is true if they expect to gratify their vanity. In hair dressing or tattooing they submit to very irksome restraint prolonged through a long time. Also in feather work, partly useful and partly ornamental, they assorted feathers piece by piece, and enlaced the feathers in the meshes of their hats and caps, or fastened them into scepters with pitch. They could make houses, etc., with their axes only by long-continued industry.[231] South American Indians made tools for printing tattoo patterns on the body. They were blocks, on each face of which a pattern was raised, perhaps a different one on each side.[232] It should be noticed what prodigious power a large body of men can put forth when they all work at the same task and are greatly interested in it. They begin by the same process, but the process differentiates and improves in their hands. Each gains skill and dexterity. They learn from each other, and the product is multiplied.

+135. Language.+ Language is a product of the folkways which illustrates their operation in a number of most important details. Language is a product of the need of coöperative understanding in all the work, and in connection with all the interests, of life. It is a societal phenomenon. It was necessary in war, the chase, and industry so soon as these interests were pursued coöperatively. Each group produced its own language which held that group together and sundered it from others.[233] All are now agreed that, whatever may have been the origin of language, it owes its form and development to usage. "Men's usage makes language." "The maxim that 'usage is the rule of speech' is of supreme and uncontrolled validity in every part and parcel of every human tongue."[234] "Language is only the imperfect means of men to find their bearings in the world of their memories; to make use of their memory, that is, their own experience and that of their ancestors, with all probability that this world of memory will be like the world of reality."[235] The origin of language is one of those origins which must ever remain enveloped in mystery. "How can a child understand the combinations of sound and sense when it must know language in order to learn them? It must learn to speak without previously knowing how to speak, without any previous suspicion that the words of its mother mean more than the buzzing of a fly. The child learns to speak from an absolute beginning, just as, not the original man, but the original beast, learned to speak before any creature could speak."[236] The beasts evidently did not learn to speak. They only learned to use the beast cries, by which they transmitted warnings, sex invitations, calls to united struggles, etc. The cries answered the purpose and went no further. Men, by virtue of the expanding power in them which enthused their zeal and their play, broke through the limitations of beast language, and went on to use the sounds of the human speech instrument for ever richer communications. Poetic power in blossom guides the development of a child's language as it guided that of the men who made the first languages.[237] "The original languages must be, in comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared with marital custom."[238] Every word has a history of accidents which have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of time.[239] In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola, or derivatives from it, for "word."[240] The students of linguistics recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying the signification of words. By metaphor they mean the assembling of like things, and the selection and extirpation of unlike things.

+136. Language and magic.+ Preuss offers an explanation of the origin of language which is interesting on account of its connection with the vast operation of magic: "Language owes its origin to the magic of tones and words. The difficulty of winning any notion about the beginnings of human speech lies in the fact that we cannot think of any cause which should give occasion for speech utterances. Such occasions are products of education, after language already existed. They are effects of language, not causes of it.... Language belongs, like play, dances, and fine arts, to the things which do not come on a direct line of development out of the instinctive satisfaction of life-needs and the other activities which create things of positive value, but it is the result of belief in magic, which prompted men to imitate noises made in labor, and other natural sounds, through a wide range, in order thereby to produce operations."[241]

+137. Language is a case of mores.+ Whitney said that language is an institution. He meant that it is in the folkways, or in the mores, since welfare is connected with the folkways of language, albeit by some superstition. He adds: "In whatever aspect the general facts of language are viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and intention."[242] "No one ever set himself deliberately at work to invent or improve language,--or did so, at least, with any valuable and abiding result. The work is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the needs of the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping a possibility, which the already acquired treasure of words and forms, and the habit of their use, suggest and put within reach."[243] "Every single item of alteration, of whatever kind, and of whatever degree of importance, goes back to some individual or individuals who set it in circulation, from whose example it gained a wider and wider currency, until it finally won that general assent, which is alone required in order to make anything in language proper and authoritative."[244] These statements might be applied to any of the folkways. The statements on page 46 of Whitney's book would serve to describe and define the mores. This shows to what an extent language is a case of the operation by which mores are produced. They are always devices to meet a need, which are imperceptibly modified and unconsciously handed down through the generations. The ways, like the language, are incorporeal things. They are borne by everybody and nobody, and are developed by everybody and nobody. Everybody has his little peculiarities of language. Each one has his peculiarities of accent or pronunciation and his pet words or phrases. Each one is suggesting all the time the use of the tricks of language which he has adopted. "Nothing less than the combined effort of a whole community, with all its classes and orders, in all its variety of characters, circumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in life a whole language."[245] "Every vocable was to us [children] an arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting use of the community of which we formed a part."[246] "We do not, as children, make our language for ourselves. We get it by tradition, all complete. We think in sentences. As our language forms sentences, that is, as our mother-tongue thinks, so we learn to think. Our brain, our entire thought-status, forms itself by the mother-tongue, and we transmit the same to our children."[247] Nature men have only petty coins of speech. They can express nothing great. They cannot compare, analyze, and combine. They are overwhelmed by a flood of details, in which they cannot discern the ruling idea. The material and sensual constitute their limits. If they move they have to get a new language. The American languages are a soft mass which changes easily if tribes separate, or as time goes on, or if they move their habitat.[248] Sometimes measures are adopted in order to make the language unintelligible, as the Bushmen insert a syllable in a word to that end.[249] "The language of nature peoples offers a faithful picture of their mental status. All is in flux. Nothing is fixed or crystallized. No fundamental thoughts, ideas, or ideals are present. There is no regularity, logic, principles, ethics, or moral character. Lack of logic in thinking, lack of purpose in willing or acting, put the mind of a nature man on a plane with that of our children. Lack of memory, antilogic, paradox, fantasy in mental action, correspond to capriciousness, levity, irresponsibility, and the rule of emotions and passions in practical action."[250] "Man's language developed because he could make, not merely passive and mechanical associative and reproductive combinations of notions, like a beast, but because he had active, free, and productive apperceptions, which appear in creative fantasy and logical reflection."[251] "Man does not speak because he thinks. He speaks because the mouth and larynx communicate with the third frontal convolution of the brain. This material connection is the immediate cause of articulate speech."[252] This is true in the sense that speech is not possible until the vocal organs are present, and are duly connected with the brain. "The specific cry, somewhat modified by the vocal resources of man, may have been sufficient for the humble vocabulary of the earliest ages, and there exists no gulf, no impassable barrier, between the language of birds, dogs, anthropoid apes, and human speech."[253] "The warning or summoning cry, the germ of the demonstrative roots, is the parent of the names of number, sex, and distance; the emotional cry of which our interjections are but the relics, in combination with the demonstratives, prepares the outlines of the sentence, and already represents the verb and the names of states or actions. Imitation, direct or symbolical, and necessarily only approximative to the sounds of external nature, i. e. onomatopoeia, furnished the elements of the attributive roots, from which arose the names of objects, special verbs, and their derivatives. Analogy and metaphor complete the vocabulary, applying to the objects, discerned by touch, sight, smell, and taste, qualifying adjectives derived from onomatopoeia. Reason, then coming into play, rejects the greater part of this unmanageable wealth, and adopts a certain number of sounds which have already been reduced to a vague and generic sense, and by derivation, combination, and affixes, which are the root sounds, produces those endless families of words, related to each other in every degree of kindred, from the closest to the most doubtful, which grammar finally ranges in the categories known as the parts of speech."[254] "That metaphor makes language grow is evident. It brings about connection between place, time, and sound ideas."[255]

+138. Primitive dialects.+ The _cebus azarae_, a monkey of Paraguay, makes six distinct sounds when excited, which causes its comrades to emit similar sounds.[256] The island Caribs have two distinct vocabularies, one of which is used by men and by women when speaking to each other, and by men when repeating, in _oratio obliqua_, some saying of the women. Their councils of war are held in a secret jargon into which women are never initiated.[257] The men and women have separate languages, a custom which is noted also amongst the Guycurus and other peoples of Brazil.[258] Amongst the Arawaks the difference between the languages of the sexes is not in regard to the use of words only, but also in regard to their inflection.[259] The two languages are sometimes differentiated by a constant change, e.g. where in the man's language two vowels come together the woman's language intercalates a _k_.[260] The Arawaks have words which only men may speak, and others which only women may speak.[261] Dialectical variations are illustrated for us by facts which come under observation and report. Christian[262] mentions an American negro castaway, who settled on Raven's Island with a native wife and children and a few relatives and servants. In forty years they had produced "a new and peculiar dialect of their own, broadening the softer vowels and substituting _th_ or _f_ for the original _t_ sound in the parent ponapeian." Martius mentions that native boatmen in Brazil, who had grown up together, had each some little peculiarity of pronunciation. Such a difference would produce a dialect in case of isolation. On the other hand, the ecclesiastics adopted the Tupi language and made it a general language for the province of Gram Para, so that it was used in the pulpit until 1757 and is now necessary for intercourse in the interior.[263] The Gauchos of central Uruguay speak Spanish with harsh rough accents. They change _y_ and _ll_ into the French _j_.[264] Whitney and Waitz thought that all American languages proceeded from a single original one. Powell thought that they were "many languages, belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin."[265] Evidence is adduced, however, that "the same aboriginal peoples who named the waters of North America coined also the prehistoric geographical titles in South America."[266] The Finns and Samoyeds are, from the standpoint of language, practically the same race. The two tongues present the highest development of the agglutinative process of the Ural-Altaic languages.[267]

+139. Taking up and dropping languages.+ The way in which languages are taken up or dropped is also perplexing. Keane[268] gives a list of peoples who have dropped one language and taken up another; he also gives a list of those who have changed physical type but have retained the same language. Holub[269] mentions the Makololo, who have almost entirely disappeared, but their language has passed to their conquerors. It became necessary to the latter from the spread of their dominion and from their closer intercourse with the peoples south of the Zambesi, on account of which, "without any intentional interference by the rulers, a common and easily understood language showed itself indispensable." Almost every village in New Guinea has its own language, and it is said that in New Britain people who live thirty miles apart cannot understand each other.[270]

+140. Pigeon dialects.+ The Germans find themselves at a disadvantage in dealing with aborigines because they have no dialect like pigeon English or the Coast Malay used by the Dutch.[271] Many examples are given, from the Baltic region, of peasant dialects made in sport by subjecting all words to the same modification.[272] Our own children often do this to English in order to make a secret language.

+141. How languages grow.+ What we see in these cases is that, if we suppose men to have joined in coöperative effort with only the sounds used by apes and monkeys, the requirement of their interests would push them on to develop languages such as we now know. The isolating, agglutinative, incorporative, and inflectional languages can be put in a series according to the convenience and correctness of the logical processes which they embody and teach. The Semitic languages evidently teach a logic different from that of the Indo-European. It is a different way of thinking which is inculcated in each great family of languages. They represent stages in the evolution of thought or ways of thinking. The instance is one of those which best show us how folkways are built up and how they are pulled down. The agglutination of words and forms sometimes seems like a steady building process; again, the process will not go forward at all. "In the agglutinative languages speech is berry jam. In the inflectional languages each word is like a soldier in his place with his outfit."[273] The "gooing" of a baby is a case of the poetic power in its blossoming exuberance. The accidental errors of pronunciation which are due to very slight individual variations in the form of the vocal organs are cases of individual contribution to the development of language. The baby words and individual mispronunciations which are taken up by a family and its friends, but never get further, show us how dialects grow. There are changes in language which are, "in their inception, inaccuracies of speech. They attest the influence of that immense numerical majority among the speakers of English who do not take sufficient pains to speak correctly, but whose blunders become finally the norm of the language."[274] In analogy things which are alike are embraced in a single term; in metaphor two or more things which seem alike, but may not be so, are grouped together and are embraced in a single term. All these modes of change in language attest the work of individuals on language. Sometimes there is extension of influence to a group. Sometimes the influence is only temporary and is rejected again. Sometimes it falls in with a drift of taste or habit, when it is taken up and colors the pronunciation or usage of the population of a great district, and becomes fixed in the language. All this is true also on the negative side, since usage of words, accent, timbre of the voice, and pronunciation (drawling, nasal tones) expel older usages. Language therefore illustrates well all the great changes of folkways under the heads of coöperation and antagonism. We have an excellent chance to study the operation in the case of slang. A people who are prosperous and happy, optimistic and progressive, will produce much slang. It is a case of play. They amuse themselves with the language. We may think the new words and phrases vulgar and in bad taste, or senseless and ridiculous. We may reject them, but the masses will decide whether they shall be permanently rejected or not. The vote is informal. The most confirmed purist will by and by utter a new slang word when he needs it. One's objections are broken down. One's taste is spoiled by what he hears. We are right in the midst of the operation of making folkways and can perceive it close at hand.

+142. Money.+ Money is another primitive device which is produced in the folkways. Money was not called into existence by any need universally experienced and which all tried to satisfy as well as they could. It was produced by developing other devices, due to other motives, until money was reached as a result. Property can be traced to portable objects which were amulets, trophies, and ornaments all at once. These could be accumulated, and if they were thought to be the abodes of powerful spirits, they were gifts which were eagerly sought, or valuable objects for exchange. They led to hoarding (since the owner did not like to part with them), and they served as marks of personal distinction.[275] The interplay of vanity and religion with the love of property demands attention. Religion also caused the aborigines of the northwest provinces of South America to go to the rivers for gold only in sufficient amount to buy what they needed. Any surplus they returned to the stream. "They say that if they borrow more than they really need the river-god will not lend them any more."[276] In later times and higher civilization coins have been used as amulets to ward off or to cure disease.[277] The Greenland Eskimo laughed when they were offered gold and silver coins. They wanted objects of steel, for which they would give anything which they had and which was desired.[278] The Tarahumari of Sonora do not care for silver money. Their Croesus raises three hundred or four hundred bushels of corn per annum. The largest herd of cattle contains thirty or forty head. They generally prefer cotton cloth to dollars.[279] "A Dyak has no conception of the use of a circulating medium. He may be seen wandering in the Bazaar with a ball of bee's wax in his hand for days together, because he cannot find anybody willing to take it for the exact article which he requires."[280] We meet with a case in which people have gold but live on a system of barter. It is a people in Laos, north of Siam. They weigh gold alone in scales against seeds of grain.[281] In the British Museum (Case F, Ireland) may be seen bronze rings, to be sewn on garments as armor or to be used as money, or both. The people along the west coast of Hindostan, from the Persian Gulf to Ceylon, used as money the fishhook which was their most important tool. It became degraded into a piece of doubled wire of silver or bronze. If the degradation had gone on, doubtless it would have resulted in a lump of metal, just as the Siamese silver coins are the result of doubling up silver rings.[282] The play of custom and convention is well shown by the use of the Macedonian coins in England. The coins of Philip bore on the obverse a head with a wreath, and on the reverse a chariot driver drawn by two horses. In Britain this coin became a sign of value and lost its reference to the sovereign. It is possible to show the order of the reigns of the kings by the successive omissions of parts of the figures, until only the wreath was left and four perpendicular strokes and two circles for the legs of one horse and two chariot wheels. Each change was a mark of value and then it was further changed to save trouble.[283] On the Palau Islands there were seven grades of money, determined by the size. Only three or four pieces exist of the first grade. The second grade is of jasper. The third consists of agate cylinders. These three grades are used only by nobles. They have the same rank as gems amongst us. The people think of the money as coming from an island where it lives a divine life, the lower ranks serving the upper. They have myths of the coming of the money to Palau.[284] These examples show to what a great extent other ideas than those of value come into play in money.