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.
[254] The Trend of Human Progress, American Anthropologist, new series,
vol. 1, 1899, p. 401.
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.
[255] The marital customs of the tribe are described postea, pp.
279-287.
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.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY