falo-hunting Indians until about the beginning of the seventeenth century.14

In each of the preceding examples of widely-spread identities or similarities of customs, there is in every case an historical basis for explaining them as the result of borrowing. With the absence of physical barriers, and taking into account the feeble means of communication in early times, the spread of new ideas and of foreign commodities was very extensive.

There is another kind of similarity, where a common historical background is not present. In this class customs appear as identical although occurring sporadically over the world and separated by wide areas where the idea is entirely absent. There is a long list of these: burial rites, exogamy, folk-tales and myths, stories of an eclipse, mother-in-law tabu, human sacrifice, bronze and iron working, the beginnings of writing, the use of a zero, and many others.

The simplest way to explain these similarities is, again, to attribute them to dissemination from a single center, with the corollary that the custom has been lost in the intervening areas where it is not now found. This is the argument used by the Rivers-Elliot-Smith School. The so-called "Heliolithic Culture" of Elliot Smith was made popular by Wells in his Outline of History. This school in general denies that the invention of a new idea can occur more than once.1 15

The "Heliolithic Culture" consists of a number of definite customs, a few of which are: circumcision, the couvade or the lying-in of the father, the erection of great stone monuments, irrigation works, sun and serpent worship, mummification, the artificial deformation of the head, tattooing, and the swastica design. Elliot Smith

places various kinds of dots on a map of the world, each variety designating one of these practices. Wherever one or more of these customs is found, it is to be traced back to Egypt as a center of dispersal. It took from 2000 to 3000 years for Egypt to assemble this list of inventions, and then a group set out about 800 B.C. to Heliolithize the rest of the world. Curiously enough, they dropped the idea of embalming in one place, of circumcision in another, and sunworship was taught in still another. Very rarely do we find that they deigned to supply any one people with the benefit of all their ideas. They were far more generous to the American aborigines than to many of the peoples in the intervening areas.

If a people in Central America started about the beginning of the Christian Era to set up stone monuments on which to present their elaborate system of hieroglyphic writing, the idea of erecting the stele came to them from Egypt. If the Incas prepared the bodies of their dead, buried them in dry sand, and mummification resulted, the idea was not original with them but can be traced back to Egypt.

This method of explaining superficial similarities as always due to contact goes back to the time of the Greeks. As Ferguson has pointed out, "The ancients were prone to consider all the circumcised peoples with whom they were acquainted, for example the Colchians and the Jews, as descendants of the Egyptians; and the Christian missionaries, better versed in the Bible than in anthropology, have been found predisposed to regard the circumcised Bantus of Central and South Africa as being in some mysterious fashion derived from the Lost Tribes of Israel." 16

Similarities in customs, in ornaments, and in designs,

are always spectacular and appeal strongly to the imagination. The dilettante can always see resemblances and draw conclusions of contact. The defects of this method of thought are many: customs are torn from their context, and no attempt is made to obtain the historical background of each practice. Similarities may be due, as has already been pointed out, to convergent evolution or to similar inventions at different times and at different places. The means whereby these different customs are carried across oceans is not considered by adherents of this theory. The urge for this world-wide migration is due, according to Perry, a disciple of Elliot Smith, to the search for pearls and gold. Thus these immigrants came into the Maya area and are responsible for the development of this culture. It can be shown that the early Mayas have a few fresh-water pearls, but during the Great Period of their culture, at a time when they were erecting their greatest cities, there is no evidence of any knowledge of gold-working. This all came at a later time in their history. Distinctive and unique features of the Maya culture, such as the truly remarkable calendar system, are passed over completely by the supporters of this theory. And yet Perry writes: "This Maya civilization, so far as we know it, reproduces many characteristic elements of Asiatic culture, and has nothing peculiar to itself." 17 The unique features of this civilization-and the calendar is only one of these are far more numerous and significant than certain characteristics that are termed "Asiatic." Truncated temple platforms, for example, do not owe their inception to the Egyptian pyramid. They are not pyramids at all in the true sense of the term. With one exception, there is not a single person who has engaged in modern

scientific exploration and excavation in the Maya and Mexican area who believes in the Asiatic origin of this culture.

The similarities in different phases of culture may be far more striking than those between the Maya and Asiatic regions and yet, in many cases, they too are but coincidences. In the Brer Rabbit stories I have shown evidence of transmission. Let me give here two stories with striking parallels, which seem to present no possibility of contact, but illustrate what is called "psychic unity."

The first of these tales is from the Northwest Coast of British Columbia. The mink is a boy or an animal, perhaps both, and he is playing with the ducks and beats them. They then begin to tease him and say, "You do not even know where your father is." The boy had never thought of this before and, running to his mother, asks her. She tells him that his father lives up in the sky and carries the sun every day. The boy wishes to visit his father; so his uncle makes him a set of bow and arrows and teaches him to shoot. He shoots the first arrow into the sun, where it remains; he sends the second into the end of the first, the third into the second, and so on, thus making a chain of arrows reaching from the earth to the sun. By this means he climbs into the heavens, where he finds his father, who allows him to carry the sun. All goes well until he reaches the top of the hill at the zenith of the sky. He gets uneasy and starts down the hill very rapidly; he kicks the clouds out of his way as he descends. His father's attention is called to the destruction taking place on earth. The trees are shriveling, the grass is parched, and all the creatures are suf

fering. The father, snatching the sun from his boy, hurls the boy from the sky.18

It is not difficult to recognize here a very close parallel with the story of Phathon, the son of Phoebus Apollo. He complains to his mother that someone has questioned the fact that he is the son of a god. His mother sends him to Phoebus to ask for himself. Phoebus Apollo, sitting on his throne, sees the boy and asks him what he is seeking. The youth replies, "Give me some proof by which I may be known as thine." His father embraces him, owns him for his son, and swears that whatever proof he may ask shall be granted. The boy immediately requests permission to drive the chariot of the sun for one day. The father tries to dissuade the boy. The first part of the way, he says, is steep; the middle is high in the heavens; and the last part of the road descends rapidly. The boy is not dissuaded, and Phoebus at last leads the way to the lofty chariot. The father reluctantly allows the boy to start, telling him to spare the whip and hold tight the reins. The steeds soon realize that the load they draw is lighter than usual; they dash headlong, leaving the travelled road. Phaethon grows pale and loses command of the horses. They rush unrestrained along unknown paths, now up in high heaven and now low almost to the earth. The clouds begin to smoke and Phaethon beholds the earth on fire. The earth looks up to heaven and prays Jupiter to end her agony at once by his thunderbolts. Jupiter, calling the gods to witness that all is lost unless some remedy be applied, brandishes a lightning bolt, launches it at the charioteer, and strikes him from his seat and from existence. Phaethon, with his hair on fire, falls headlong to the earth.