ition of blood kinship, and derived from the conscious adoption
of an experience which has not reached the stage of blood kinship, but
which includes a close association with natural objects. All this
makes it advisable to take fuller count of pygmy culture than has
hitherto been given to it. The pygmies have in truth always been a
problem in man's history. From the time of Homer, Herodotos, and
Aristotle, the pygmies have had their place among the observable types
of man, or among the traditions to which observers have given
credence. In modern times they have been accounted for either as
peoples degraded from a higher level of culture, or as peoples who
have never advanced. But whether we look upon these people as the last
remnants of the primitive condition of hostility or whether they are
reversions to that condition by reason of like causes, they bring
before us what conjectural research has prepared us for. The first
supposition is neither impossible nor incredible. The slow
spreading-out in hostile regions would allow of the preservation of
some examples of preference for unrestrained licence at the expense of
constant hostility, in place of a modified peacefulness at the expense
of restricted freedom in matters so dear to the human animal as sexual
choice and power. The second supposition contains an element of human
history which must find a place in anthropological research. The
possible phases of social formation are very limited. If any section
of mankind cannot develop in one direction, they will stagnate at the
stage they have reached, or they will retrograde to one of the stages
from which in times past they have proceeded. There is no other
course, and the very limitations of primitive life prevent us from
considering the possibility of any other course. Either of these
alternatives allows us to consider the examples of hostile
inter-grouping as sufficient to supply us with the vantage ground for
observation of man in his earliest stages of existence. Perhaps each
of them may contain somewhat of the truth. But whatever may be
considered as the true cause of the pygmy level of culture, there is
an underlying factor which must count most strongly in its
determination, namely, that these people are the people who in the
process of migration have been pushed out to the last strongholds of
man. Whether they could not or would not conform to the newer
condition of stationary or comparatively stationary society