few properly accredited officials. It is true that there was a constant night patrol of the villages and on ceremonial occasions a day police, but that these officers acted in case of murder or theft is improbable.
Now that we are at the end of this somewhat tedious survey, we may summarize the data, meager though they be. In the first place, it is only the complex governments of Peru and Mexico that exercised systematic judicial functions in what we consider criminal cases. Almost everywhere else the family group, the gens or clan, as the case may be, was left to its own devices in meeting such situations. There were always conventional ways of proceeding, but these were almost entirely outside the jurisdiction of the tribal government. Everywhere, of course, the concept of "life for life" is entertained, but the tendency in the New World is for the true blood feud to be found among those tribes having the simplest family organizations, whose distribution is shown on our map for social grouping; while in the regions of clans and gentes provision is made for compensating the injured parties either by a single execution, for which no retaliation is permitted, or by the payment of an indemnity. That this seemingly close correlation indicates a true functional relation between the two is doubtful, since it may be largely a matter of geographical segregation; yet, there remains the undeniable fact that at least the conventional methods of dealing with crime have geographical distributions in every way comparable to those for other traits of culture. Hence, their presence in any given locality is to be explained by historical principles and not as due to inherent reactions. The principle of "blood for blood" may be innate and consequently world-wide, but its mere presence does not account for the conventional procedures we have noted, nor for their peculiar distributions.
Like every other subject in this volume, this one admits of great elaboration, but space and time forbid more than passing notice of a few collateral practices. Thus, it often happens that the shaman in a group comes to have an official relation to its judicial system. This is particularly noticeable among the wilder peoples of South America where the shaman, or
