evolution.[1] This way of explaining ethnic similarities is certainly in general very legitimate. At first sight it often appears trustworthy, and saves the trouble of inventing fantastic migrations. In thousands of cases men of every period, every country, every race have conducted themselves in the same way, had the same ideas, realised the same inventions, adopted the same practices, without knowing each other, without even supposing the existence of the other peoples, and this simply because all of them were part of the great human family. But between the Mongoloids of North America, their cousins of Northern Asia, and the Hawaians, there is probably the bond of a distant and common origin, and, besides this, the nomad Mongols of Asia have more than once penetrated into India. Up to the present time, half-savage Mongol tribes occupy entire regions of the Himalayah. Mongols and Tamils have had wide and long communications with each other during prehistoric ages; it has therefore been possible for them to borrow mutually their system of kinship. There exists quite a chain of peoples, including the Tamils of India, the least civilised Mongols, the American Redskins, and lastly the greater number of the Polynesians, all of whom have formerly adopted, or still practise systems of kinship, based, not on consanguinity, but on a classification more or less fictitious.
The fact is interesting; but it is somewhat bold to attach to it, as Morgan has done, a universal value, and to pretend that all human races have passed through this phase of kinship by classes. Even in the countries where this familial form prevails, it is subject to more than one exception, and it is probable that each great human type, having had its special centre of creation, has evolved physically and psychically in its own manner, sometimes unconsciously imitating the others, but quite as often deviating from them, according as the environment, the difficulties to be overcome, and the necessities of the struggle for existence imposed on it such or such a line of conduct.
- ↑ L. Morgan, Conjectural Solution of the Origin of the Classificatory System of Relationship, in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1868.
