found in language; every one knows that a language is not inherited, for if such were the case a person would speak French, Algonquian, or Chinese according to his parentage, and not according to his first associates. Neither are shooting with bows or kindling fire with firedrills inherited. Yet, such are the elements that constitute culture-complexes. It appears, then, that the form and direction the development of culture takes is something of another sort from that followed by organic evolution, because the perpetuating mechanism is not the same. Further, the knowledge we now possess of culture prohibits any fundamental distinctions in this respect between, say, the Eskimo and the English, for in neither case is the particular form of culture perpetuated by direct inheritance. The phenomenon of English culture is made the subject matter of English history, but it is a fair assumption that the causes that operate in it are of the same general type as those that operate in Eskimoan culture. Hence, in dealing with problems of culture, we must take our points of regard from the historian, because he deals with the phenomena where the approaches are most complete and direct. We assume, therefore, that the culture complex of the Eskimo grew up in the same type manner as that of England and is, in other words, a historical fact. Both are conceived of as perpetuated and evolved by social mechanisms. On the other hand, the straight black hair of the New World native and the more specific cephalic character of the Eskimo are not facts of the same series and are perpetuated by a mechanism we call inheritance.
It seems strange that these two series of facts should be continually confused to the extent of reading the interpretations arising from one directly into the structure of the other. In so far, then, as anthropology deals with culture, which is, after all, the only distinctly human phenomenon in the objective sense, it conceives of it as historical phenomena and this conception is in so far the soul of its method. But anthropology is something more than the study of culture; it is essentially a coördinating and synthetizing science. It seeks to bring to bear upon the problem of man the full joint force of geology, zoology, and history. To do this is a no mean task, a task
