(Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, etc.) are synonymous with pain and suffering, have corroborated such a view. Indeed, in English one word is still applicable to the ‘labor’ of women in child-birth, of the peasant in the field and of the man of science in his laboratory or in his study. According to Ferrero,[1] the habit of work is one of the great acquisitions of civilized man, who has left his opinion of its disagreeableness, not merely in words by which it is named, but also in myths and legends scattered all over the globe, in which the necessity to labor is represented (as in some of the Eden stories) as a result of the sinfulness of the fathers of the race. Vierkandt,[2] in his recent study of savagery and civilization, synthetizes these two stages of human progress as ‘play’ and ‘organization’ respectively. Professor Karl Bücher,[3] of Leipzig, who devotes one section of a very interesting and suggestive book to the ‘work methods of primitive peoples,’ reviews briefly the ‘horror laboris’ theory, pointing out that the latest and most trustworthy studies of savage and barbarous peoples indicate, beyond a doubt, that a very large amount of work is performed by them, though the impulses leading up to it are not the same as those which influence the work of cultured races, the technical aids are very imperfect, the work processes complicated, and a tendency to artistic elaboration and adornment is marked among the uncivilized peoples. With Ferrero, Bücher holds that the horror laboris could hardly have originated from bodily fatigue, since many of the phenomena of activity among primitive peoples, notably some of their dances, continue until utter weariness and exhaustion end them. According to Bücher,[4] it is aversion to effort of the mind and will, not repugnance to bodily exertion and fatigue, that causes the savage to dislike work. His dislike is of psychic origin, and in such performances as the dance, which are carried on to the point of exhaustion and fatigue he finds ‘an easy means of discharging, without destroying the condition of mental inertia so characteristic of him, the accumulation of nerve-force in his intellectual organs.’ That this theory can be carried too far and that the dance and cognate activities are not the only ones which the savage is capable of carrying on in genius-fashion is evident from the researches of Boas and other competent and thoroughgoing students of primitive man. The most suggestive of all recent writings on this head is Dr. W J McGee's[5] account of the Seri Indians of Tiburon Island and the adjacent Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California. These Indians are not
- ↑ ‘Les formes primitives du travail.’ Rev. Scientif. (Paris), 1896, pp. 331-335. See also: Les lois psychologiques du symbolisme (Paris, 1895), pp. 13, 24.
- ↑ ‘Naturvölker und Kulturvölker’ (Leipzig, 1896).
- ↑ ‘Arbeit und Rhytlimus.’ 2te Aufl. (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 1-23.
- ↑ Loc. cit., p. 21.
- ↑ Seventeenth Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. (Washington, 1898 [1901], pp. 1-128, 129*-344*.
