the island a sort of recognised tribal monopoly
in certain articles produced, or that have been long manufactured in
their own district. For instance, a tribe that does not grow potatoes,
or make a particular kind of mat, will go a long way year after year to
barter for those articles, which if they liked they themselves could
easily produce or manufacture."[312] The remarkable case of the Todas
specialising in cattle rearing and dairy farming is another example.
Other people, both higher and lower in civilisation than the Todas, keep
cattle and know the value of milk, but it is reserved for the Todas
alone to have used this particular economic basis of their existence as
the basis also of their social formation and their religious life.[313]
The result is that they neglect other forms of social existence. They
are not totemists, though perhaps they have the undeveloped germs of
totemistic beliefs.[314] Their classificatory system of relationship
makes their actual kinship scarcely recognisable; they "have very
definite restrictions on the freedom of individuals to marry," and have
a two-class endogamous division, but their marriage rite is merely the
selection of nominal fathers for their children.[315] Throughout the
careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this
people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself
upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of
decadence.[316] I do not know that anywhere else could be found a
stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the
social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation
does not extend to a whole people, but rather to sections, as, for
instance, among the Gold Coast tribes of Africa who "transmit the secret
of their skill from father to son and keep the corporation to which they
belong up to a due degree of closeness by avoiding intermarriage with
any of the more unskilled labourers,"[317] and Dr. Bucher, who has
worked out many of the earliest conditions of primitive economics,
concludes that it may be safely claimed that every "tribe displays some
favourite form of industrial activity in which its members surpass the
other tribes."[318] This rule extends to the lowest type of man, as, for
instance, among the Australians. Each tribe of the Narrinyeri, says
Taplin, have been accustomed to make those articles which their tract of
country enabled them to produce most easily; one t