While the highly developed traits represented by pedestrian habit
and hand-and-tooth habit and segregative habit expressing race-sense
are conspicuous during exercise, each carries an equally well-marked
obverse. Thus, while the Seri are known as runners par excellence
in a region of runners, and were named by aboriginal neighbors from
their spryness of movement, they have been no less notorious among the
Caucasian settlers of two generations for unparalleled laziness—for
a lethargic sloth beyond that of sluggish ox and somnolent swine,
which was an irritating marvel to the patient padres of the eighteenth
century, and is today a byword in the even-tempered Land of Mañana;
concordantly the sinewy hands and muscular jaws are noticeably inert
during the intervals between intense functionings, are practically
free from the spontaneous or nervous movements of habitually busy
persons, and contribute by their immobility to the air of indolence
or languor which so impressed padres and rancheros; concordantly
also, the manifestations of race hate, doubtless culminating among
warriors on the warpath, are strongly contrasted with the abject
docility of the Seri groups when at peace and in camp near Costa Rica
and other ranchos—a docility far exceeding that of the Papago, whose
personal dignity is an ever-present possession, or that of Yaqui,
whose strong spirit so often breaks the curb of Caucasian control. So
the observer of the Seri is impressed by the intensity of functioning
along lines defined by their characteristic traits, and equally by the
capriciousness of the functioning and the remarkably wide range between
activity and inactivity which render them aggregations of extremes—the
Seri are at once the swiftest and the laziest, the strongest and the
most inert, the most warlike and the most docile of tribesmen; and
their transitions from rôle to rôle are singularly capricious and
sudden. At the same time the observer is impressed by the relatively
long intervals between the periods of activity; true, the intense
activity may cover hours, as in the chase of a deer, or days, as in a
distant predatory raid, or perhaps even weeks, when the tribe is on the
warpath; yet all the known facts indicate that far the greater portion
of the time of warriors, women, and children is spent in idle lounging
about rancherias and camps, in lolling and slumbering in the sun by day
and in huddling under the scanty shelter of jacales or shrubbery by
night—i. e., when their activity is measured by hours, their intervals
of repose must be measured by days.
* * * * *
Summarizing those somatic traits connected with habitual functioning,
the Seri may be considered as characterized by (1) distinctive
pedestrian habit, (2) conspicuous hand-and-tooth habit correlated with
defective tool-sense, and (3) pronounced segregative habit correlated
with a highly specialized race-sense; yet they are characterized no
less by extreme alternations from the most intense functioning to
complete quiescence—the periods of intensity being relatively short,
and the intervals of quiescence notably long.
* * * * *
On reviewing the more conspicuous somatic structures and functions
jointly, they are found to throw some light on their own development,
and hence on the natural history of the Seri tribe.
Certain characteristics of the tribe strongly suggest lowly condition,
i. e., a condition approaching that of lower animals, especially
of carnivorous type; among these are the specific color, the
centripetally developed body, the tardy adolescence, the defective
tool-sense, the distinctive food habits (especially the consumption
of raw offal and carrion), the independence of fixed habitations, and
the extreme alternations between the rage of chase and war and the
quiescence of sluggish repose. But these primitive characteristics
are opposed or qualified by such features as the noble stature, the
capacious and shapely brain-case, the well-developed hands, and the
considerable intelligence revealed in native shrewdness as well as in
organization and belief. Collectively the characteristics are in some
measure incongruous; yet all are at least fairly compatible with
the inference that the tribe is exceptionally (if not incomparably)
low in the scale of general human development, yet at the same time
highly specialized along certain lines; and the inference in turn
is corroborated by the coincidence between the special lines of
development and the peculiar conditions of environment characterizing
the habitat of the tribe.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY