mere physical
fact of having a mother and father, and the political fact of using
this kinship for social organisation. Savages who have not learnt the
political significance have but the scantiest appreciation of the
physical fact. The Australians, for instance, have no term to express
the relationship between mother and child. This is because the
physical fact is of no significance, and not as Mr. Thomas thinks
because of the meagreness of the language.[325] Our field
anthropologists do not quite understand the savage in this respect. It
is of no use preparing a genealogical tree on the basis of civilised
knowledge of genealogy if such a document is beyond the ken of the
people to whom it relates. The information for it may be correctly
collected, but if the whole structure is not within the compass of
savage thought it is a misleading anthropological document. It is of
no use translating a native term as "father," if father did not mean
to the savage what it means to us. It might mean something so very
different. With us, fatherhood connotes a definite individual with all
sorts of social, economical, and political associations, but what
does it mean to the savage? It may mean physical fatherhood and
nothing more, and physical fatherhood may be a fact of the veriest
insignificance. It may mean social fatherhood, where all men of a
certain status are fathers to all children of the complementary
status, and social fatherhood thus becomes much more than we can
understand by the term father.

We cannot ignore the evidence which over-specialisation in one
direction and neglect in other directions supply to anthropology. It
shows us that human societies cannot always be measured in the scale
of culture by the most apparent of the social elements contained in
them. The cannibalism of the Fijians, the art products of the Maori,
the totemism of the Australian blacks, do not express all that makes
up the culture of these people, although it too often happens that
they are made to do duty for the several estimates of culture
progress. It follows that a survey of the different human societies
might reveal examples of the possible lowest in the scale as well as
various advances from the lowest; or in lieu of whole societies in the
lowest scale, there might be revealed unexceptional examples of the
possible lowest elements of culture within societies not wholly in the
lowest scale. It will be seen how valuable an asset this must