THE HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON
TYPICAL SERI MATRON
A striking correspondence between Seri physique and Seri habitat is revealed in the pedal development, with the attendant development of muscle and bone, lung capacity, and heart power, together with other faculties involved in the pedestrian habit. Seriland is a hard and inhospitable home; sea-food is indeed abundant and easily taken, but water is terribly—often fatally—scarce, and obtainable only by distant journeying from the places of easy food supply; moreover, the monotony of the diet is alleviable only by extensive wandering for the collection of vegetal products or severe chase after land animals; while the warlike spirit, apparently inherited from a still less humane ancestry and fostered by the geographic isolation, combines to keep the tribe afoot, avoiding waters, conducting raids, and moving constantly from place to place in the endless search for safety. There is a widespread Sonoran tradition that the Seri systematically exterminate weaklings and oldsters; and it is beyond doubt that the tradition has a partial foundation in the elimination of the weak and helpless through the literal race for life in which the bands participate on occasion. A parallel eliminative process is common among many American aborigines; the wandering bands frequently undergo hard marches under the leadership of athletic warriors with whom all are expected to keep pace, and this leads both to desertion of the aged and feeble and to increased strength and endurance on the part of the strong and enduring; yet it would appear that this merciless mechanism for improving the fit and eliminating the unfit attains unusual, if not unequaled, perfection among the Seri. Now pedal development is one of the special processes of peripheral (or centrifugal) functioning and growth involved in the general process of cheirization, which, coordinately with cephalization, defines human progress;[254] and this developmental process explains the specialization of the Seri along one or more lines, and connects the special development directly with environing conditions.
A notable correspondence between structure and function, of such sort as to reflect the habit and habitat, appears in the conspicuous manual development of the Seri. Enjoying a climate too mild to make houses necessary, finding animal food too plentiful to necessitate elaborate contrivances for the chase or milling or other devices for reducing vegetal food, provided by nature with material (in the form of carrizal) for an ideally suitable water craft, barred by geographic boundaries from neighboring tribes, and having neither material for nor interest in commerce, the denizens of Seriland were never forced into the way of mechanical development; yet their simple industries, involving as they do swift stroke and strong grasp and dexterous digitation, are mainly such as urge manual development more strenuously than would be normal among tribesmen connected with their environment through the medium of tools. The demand for manual strength and skill is intensified among the Seri by both natural and domestic conditions; the ever-ready (and almost the sole) material suitable for simple adjuncts to the hand abounds in the form of wave-worn cobbles; these cobbles are easily usable in such wise as to serve all ordinary purposes, and their abundance discourages the production of more highly differentiated tools; while their habitual use promotes manual strength and deftness, coupled with that digital freedom (required, for example, in grasping a ball) which most clearly distinguishes the human hand from the subhuman paw. Conjoined with these natural conditions are demotic demands tending to cultivate manual fitness and eliminate the manually unfit; for, in addition to the direct industrial premium on dexterity, through which the dexterous survive while the clumsy starve, there is a special premium growing out of the marriage custom, through which only the manually efficient (and at the same time morally acceptable) are put in the way of leaving lines of descendants.[255] Naturally, in view of the combination of factors, all traceable directly or indirectly to environmental conditions, the Seri afford a peculiarly striking example of cheirization extended to an entire tribe (if not to a genetic stock of people)—indeed the remarkably developed Seri hands and feet first suggested the importance of this process of human development and led to its formal characterization.
Accordingly, the robust-bodied and slender-limbed yet big-fisted and big-footed Seri seem to be adjusted, so far as several of their more striking somatic characters are concerned, to distinctive habits themselves reflecting a distinctive habitat; and the coincidences appear to reveal and establish the law of interaction between the human organism and its environment—an interaction effected through the habits and hence through, the normal functioning of the individual organisms as constrained through their collective relations. And recognition of the law of interaction opens the way to consideration of other correspondences between structures and functions and environing conditions.
Conspicuous among the more strictly functional traits of the Seri is the intensity of action characteristic especially of the warriors, though in less degree of the entire tribe—an intensity made all the more striking by contrast with the extreme inertness between stresses. Manifestly the capacity for concentrated effort is in harmony with the tribal habits, themselves reflecting habitat. The resource of prime importance in Seriland—that which directly and constantly conditions the very existence of human inhabitants—is potable water. This prime source of life is too heavy to be transported and too unstable to be stored with the facilities of primitive culture, yet it is always within reach of an organism strong enough to journey ten or twenty or fifty miles in search of it, and acute enough to follow trails and indications. Naturally the meager water-supply serves as a mechanism for sorting out and preserving the strong and the acute, and for eliminating the weakly and the dull; and hence the tribe have developed a faculty, or perhaps a potentiality, of distinctive sort—the potentiality of providing against thirst-death by a reserve power in the organism itself rather than in the form of mechanical devices such as characterize higher culture. Quite similar are the relations to the resource of second importance, i. e., ordinary food. Habituated to dispensing with storage and transportation of their primary resource, and accustomed to finding food whenever forced to sufficiently active effort to obtain it, the Seri have never grasped that first principle of thrift expressed in the accumulation of food supplies; and accordingly they intuitively rely on successful fishing or chase or search of vegetal edibles for sustenance, and habitually delay effort until they are stirred into activity by the pangs of hunger. Naturally this improvidence serves as another mechanism for perpetuating families of stored vitality, and especially those able to prevail over swift or strong or cunning quarry by sustained vigor and alertness after prolonged deprivation; and the effect of this mechanism, too, is to develop a reserve power in the organism itself, in lieu of the material reserve made through thrift in higher culture. Similar in their consequences are the relations of the individual organisms to the third industry of Seriland, i. e., navigation of the gale-swept and tide-troubled waters. Even the buoyant balsa can not weather the williwaws or ride the tiderips of El Infiernillo without exercise of the utmost strength and skill on the part of the navigators; while the often persistent storms may delay for days embarkation on voyages in quest of fresh water or food. Naturally, the frequent delays and not infrequent perils of such navigation constitute a mechanism for selecting navigators possessed of reserve powers adequate to meet desperate emergencies with vigor and judgment even after enervating waits for wind and tide, while those not so well endowed are either brought up to standard in their hard training-school or expelled from their class by drowning or dashing on the rocks, as may happen; so that the effect of this mechanism also is to preserve individuals and perpetuate generations characterized by reserve power, and hence to develop latent potentiality in the tribe. Now, the normal product of these and other natural mechanisms immediately reflecting environmental conditions is capacity for spurts, or for intense functioning under severe stress, despite accentuation of the stress by thirst or hunger or exhaustion, or by all combined—i. e., the effect of habitat and habit is to produce precisely such a somatic regimen as that so conspicuously displayed by the Seri folk. So the intensified activity with long intervals of inertness, simulating the habits of carnivorous and some other lower animals, and hence suggesting primitive condition, would appear to be largely a phylogenetically acquired character expressing specific adjustment to environment.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XXI
THE HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON
SERI RUNNER