lending of
peoples, how far to transmission through mere contact or transient
settlement.

The considerations I have brought forward have, however, in my opinion
an importance still more fundamental. If social institutions have this
relatively great degree of permanence, if they are so deeply seated and
so closely interwoven with the deepest instincts and sentiments of a
people that they can only gradually suffer change, will not the study
of this change give us our surest criterion of what is early and what is
late in any given culture, and thereby furnish a guide for the analysis
of culture? Such criteria of early and late are necessary if we are to
arrange the cultural elements reached by our analysis in order of time,
and it is very doubtful whether mere geographical distribution itself
will ever furnish a sufficient basis for this purpose. I may remind you
here that before the importance of the complexity of Melanesian culture
had forced itself on my mind, I had already succeeded in tracing out a
course for the development of the structure of Melanesian society, and
after the complexity of the culture had been established, I did not find
it necessary to alter anything of essential importance in this scheme. I
suggest, therefore, that while the ethnological analysis of cultures
must furnish a necessary preliminary to any general evolutionary
speculations, there is one element of culture which has so relatively
high a degree of permanence that its course of development may furnish a
guide to the order in time of the different elements into which it is
possible to analyze a given complex.

If the development of social structure is thus to be taken as a guide to
assist the process of analysis, it is evident that there will be
involved a logical process of considerable complexity in which there
will be the danger of arguing in a circle. If, however, the analysis of
culture is to be the primary task of the anthropologist, it is evident
that the logical methods of the science will attain a complexity far
exceeding those hitherto in vogue. I believe that the only logical
process which will in general be found possible will be the formulation
of hypothetical working schemes into which the facts can be fitted, and
that the test of such schemes will be their capacity to fit in with
themselves, or, as we generally express it, "explain" new facts as they
come to our knowledge. This is the method of other sciences which deal
w