NATURAL PEBBLE CONSIDERABLY USED AS HAMMER, GRINDER, AND ANVIL (BOTTOM
AND EDGE)]
It is to be realized that the successive stages represent
characteristic phases of normal and continuous growth, and hence that
their relations are intimate and complex. The fundamental factor of
the growth is intellectual advancement, and hence in actual life each
stage is at once the germ and the foundation for the next higher; each
stage is characterized by a type or a cognate series of types, yet
each commonly contains a few forms prophetic of the next stage and
many forms vestigial of the earlier stages; so that the stages are to
be likened unto successive generations of organisms, or (still more
appropriately) to the successive phases of ovum, larva, pupa, and imago
in the ontogeny of the insect rather than to the arbitrary classes of
pigeonhole arrangements. The complex relations conceived to exist among
the stages can be indicated more clearly by diagraphic representation
than by typographic arrangement, and such a representation is
introduced as figure 38. The successive curves in the diagram express
the rhythmic character of progress and the cumulative value of its
interrelated factors, as well as the dominance of successive types
until gradually sapped and absorbed (though not immediately or
completely annihilated) by higher types reflecting a strengthened
mentality.
[Illustration: FIG. 38—Diagrammatic outline of industrial development.]
* * * * *
The place of the normal pacific industries of the Seri in this genetic
classification of human technic is definite. The Seri craft combines
the features of the zoomimic and protolithic stages more completely
than that of any other known folk, and in such wise as to reveal the
relations between these stages and that next higher in the series with
unparalleled clearness; their craft also displays an aberrant (and
hence presumptively accultural) feature pertaining to the technolithic
stage; and in so far as their craftsmen use the material typical of
the age of metal they degrade it to the transitional substage between
dominant zoomimicry and designless stone-using.
Viewed in the general light of their pacific industries, the Seri are,
accordingly, among the most primitive of known tribes; their technic is
in harmony with their esthetic, and also with their somatic and tribal
characteristics, in attesting a lowly plane of development; while
their industries, like their other demotic features, are essentially
autochthonous.