[75] Not an unusual state of things among the Melanesians and Micronesians, and in a degree among the Australians.
[77] E. g., some Australian natives and some of the lower Malay cultures.
[78] E. g., the Pueblo and the Eskimo.
[79] Indeed, such as very suggestively to recall the ritual objects and observances of the Pueblo Indians.
[80] For an extreme case of this among living communities, see Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, vol. i, pp. 242–250, where the generalisation is set down (p. 248) that “the rudimentary stage of culture through which these tribes have passed, and in some cases are still passing, may perhaps be more accurately described as a wood and bone age than as an age of stone,” in as much as the evidence goes to show that before they began to get metals from the Malays their only implements of a more durable material were “the anvil and hammer (unwrought) ..., the whetstone, chips or flakes used as knives, and cooking stones.” From the different character of their environment this recourse to wood and bone could scarcely have been carried to such an extreme by the savages of the Baltic region.
[81] Cf. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan.
[82] A casual visit to the Scandinavian museums will scarcely convey this impression. To meet the prepossessions of the public, and perhaps of the experts, the weapons are made much of in the showcases, as is to be expected; but they are relatively scarce in the store-rooms, where the tools on the other hand are rather to be estimated by the cubic yard than counted by the piece.
[83] Seen, e. g., in the observance and sanction of tabu in many of the lower cultures.
[84] The Eskimo are placed in circumstances that are in some respects similar to those presumed to have conditioned the life of the blond race and its hybrids during the early phases of its life-history, and among the traits that have made for the survival of the Eskimo is undoubtedly to be counted the somewhat genial good-fellowship of that race, coupled as it is with a notable disinclination to hostilities. So also the Indians of the North-West Coast, whose situation perhaps parallels that of the neolithic Baltic culture more closely even than the Eskimo, are not among the notably warlike peoples of the earth, although they undoubtedly show more of a predatory animus than their northern neighbours. In this case it is probably safe to say that their technological achievements have in no degree been furthered by such warlike enterprise as they have shown, and that their comfort and success as a race would have been even more marked if they had been gifted with less of the warlike spirit and had kept the peace more consistently throughout their habitat than they have done.—Cf. Franz Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Report, 1884–1885; The same, “The Secret Societies and Social Organisation of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Report, National Museum, 1895; A. P. Niblack, “Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia,” ibid, 1888.