Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/499

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440 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i t 1899

by exercise, and to extend and finally unite interests throughout the realm of humanity.

Sociology. — The institutions of human kind express that collec- tivity which demarks man most clearly from the brute. True, their germs bud in the subhuman family, as among the orangs and gorillas, whose family-group comprises a male protector and a female supporter of their own young ; yet they expand cumula- tively with the upwelling of the esthetic and the extension of the industrial, as well as with other factors involved in the growth of knowledge. The primary institutional bond appears to reside in maternal instinct, which is warmed by survival into a lax super- organic mechanism for the maintenance of kind through the nurture and protection of the young, and eventually grows by the survival of the affectionate and far-sighted into the maternal family-group or clan, in which the basis of organization is kinship traced in the female line; for it is not until knowledge has risen a long way up the genealogic tree of human development that the full meaning of the spasmodic pairing instinct is grasped and finally fixed by fully recognized paternity. With the enlarge- ment of the family-group, the need for common protection arises and is met by spontaneous and mutual selection of leaders, and thus another institutional bond is woven ; as the group enlarges and subdivides through the exigencies of food-quest or strife, sub-leaders are similarly chosen, and the idea of chiefship deter- mined by prowess and shrewdness is developed ; and eventually each individual in the group learns his or her place in the perfected hierarchy into which the group is forced by the inter- minable struggle between its own collective vitality and the great external. Commonly the incipient governmental organization is .$lj • strengthened by differentiation of function, especially into war-

rior-protectors, who are generally males, and more plodding food- producers, who are generally females — though the domestic con- trol is vested largely or wholly in the mothers of the groups until paternity is recognized. Another factor, born of the ceaseless

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