clusion as to his rôle and functions but at some definite result concerning the influence specific individuals have exercised in definite places on definite occasions.

If it is the task of the historian to describe a given epoch or the changes that have taken place to produce this epoch, then his ideal will naturally be to include as many individuals in his necessarily generalized description as he can. This, it must be confessed, has not always been his method. Now what statement a man will accept as including all the members of a group or a sufficiently representative number of them, will depend largely upon the individual and the generation in which he lives. The two preceding generations were apparently content with a far more generalized answer than many of the present would consider satisfactory. Western European history was for a long time and to a large extent still is, written in terms of the intellectual class. This in itself is an important admission of the existence of two large groups, vague though they be. Today we have histories written from practically all points of view and representing not only the different classes into which the modern world is divided but also certain special groups-the theologian, the soldier, the scholar, the business man, etc. Doubtless this subdivision will continue and it is conceivable that some day in the near future we may have, for instance, the history of the religious beliefs of some definite country written from the viewpoint of different temperaments in society, from that of the intensely religious man, the intermittently religious, the indifferently religious, etc., and other phases of culture; from groupings of men not only according to social condition but according to intellectual and emotional characteristics. Such a statistical description of culture is the only one that, it seems likely, the coming generation will consider as accurate. In a partial manner such accounts have been given us not infrequently by historians although they were rarely aware of it.

Such seems to be a fair statement of the present scope

of history and what a more critical audience is likely to demand in the future. The pertinent question we have now to ask is why the ethnologist, having learned certain facts from the historian, stopped short and missed the cardinal point of the latter's method-the description of the changes in a definite but naturally limited region in terms of its own specific past history? There is no indication that he has put the historical method, as currently used, to the test of a critical examination, found it lacking and therefore in part rejected it. His attitude is simply grounded in the antecedents of the analytical method. What history accepted as facts, ethnology treated as concepts arrived at through psychological analysis. We find consequently that it is the concept of cultural dissemination, the concept of convergent evolution, the concept of survivals that is dealt with. But these are facts. This the ethnologist acknowledges theoretically but since these facts have come to him through psychology, they have subtle meanings and implications utterly foreign to the historian. How completely ethnology, in America, is dominated by this strictly philosophical approach is demonstrated finally by the fact that only those historical processes discovered through analysis were widely applied, and as it had not discovered the cardinal point in the historical method, it was not employed.

It is something of a paradox that the latest efforts of some members of the analytical school in America should consist in an onslaught upon the psychological approach to which they, in so large a manner, still cling. What renders their critique of especial importance is their denial of any connection between psychology and ethnology. The rigorous application of these principles leads them finally to reject the rôle of the individual entirely, as smacking too much of psychology. If in a group, for instance, spirits are conceived of as communicating with some individuals. through certain sounds, with others visually and with still others by certain effects noticed, these differences would be ruled out because they belong to the domain of psychology.

When an Indian, for instance, kills the murderer of his brother, he does not do it because he has a natural desire for revenge but because the killing of a murderer is a custom demanded by his tribe. That the Indian may perhaps be prompted to act in the proper folkway is of no consequence. If the folkway changes, it would very likely be contended that a new method has been borrowed from another group.

It is strange to see how close they always are to the core of the historical method and yet how they always avoid taking the last fatal step. For if they would only grant to the motives prompting an action a certain efficacy in determining, at times, exactly how it should be performed, they might then be able to account for the development of changes within a given tribe without having to call in outside influences except when needed, and without being forced to ascribe to this outside contact more than a merely general stimulating effect. Even if an Indian tells you, as the writer can testify, that when his brother was found murdered he longed to revenge his death, these words and the state of mind of the individual, are not part of the data of ethnology, however interesting they may be to the psychologist. Indeed what is more, they have no influence upon the development of the group. The mental state of any person is a fact of individual psychology. In other words, upon the killing of X, Y mechanically slays the murderer in a definite way. Such a view betrays only too clearly the purely psychological treatment. The individual counts for naught, not because a large number of observable facts have been examined and have shown that the development of culture can be interpreted in other terms, but because a psychological analysis of culture (whether conscious or unconscious is immaterial) leads to the conclusion that the group is the ultimate unit! It is a general proposition that is here postulated and whatever philosophical validity it may have, it is the undeniable right of the historian and the hypercritically minded ethnologist to demand the proof.

Why the demand is made that ethnology be divorced

from psychology is now clear. The attack is made upon individual psychology. A recent ethnologist even goes so far as to feel that examples taken from experimental psychology are justified to prove his contention. For reasons not quite clear, it is assumed that every time emphasis is laid upon the rôle of the individual, one is dealing with individual psychology. That such a procedure is the very denial of all that is vital in the historical method, it is needless to say. The individual is of importance or of no importance as definite events show, not because of a general principle. No one will insist, of course, that ethnology, even if it be history in the strict sense of the term, need follow in every respect the method laid down for the latter in the past or today. But if its function be that of history, it must do that which is demanded of history-deal with facts as they have conceivably happened in a definite area in the past. As long as ethnology adheres to the principles recently enunciated by a number of ethnologists, however skilfully it may manipulate purely historical processes such as cultural dissemination and culture centers, it is only masquerading in an historical guise. If there were any necessity for resorting to this method, if under the conditions it were, though inadequate, the only line ethnological research could take, there would be little to say; but it so happens that despite the impossibility of ever obtaining the definite chronology which history proper demands, ethnology has an opportunity of performing the other function of history-the description of a definite period in a manner that would not only redound to her credit, but might even suggest, to the older discipline, new lines of treatment.

Among primitive men we are dealing with small units, large enough nevertheless to have developed all the characteristics of the more complex civilizations of the Orient and the West. It is possible to make an intensive study among them and still not be lost in an inextricable maze, such as would be impossible among us. The relation of the individual to his group, the method adopted to teach

him in what this relation shall consist, his individual reactions, individual motives, individual variations, can be studied at a close range not attainable in any of the civilizations of the past or the present. From the results of such investigations a clearer understanding of the rôle of the individual in those two fundamental processes of historythe conservation of the past and the modifications of the past-might be obtained than any detached psychological analysis could possible give, and, at the same time, the legitimate part the study of individual psychology can play, will be better understood. Instead of ethnologists then speaking of the unique nature and feeling only its psychological implications, they might be brought face to face with these happenings and thus understand them in a more real

manner.

A few examples might perhaps be in place here. In a new ceremony lately introduced among the Winnebago Indians of Nebraska, a time-honored custom of making the circuit of the ceremonial lodge before entering it, has been abandoned because the leader on one occasion felt that it harked back to customs to which he was antagonistic. In spite of the tremendous influence of the old cultural background, that particular custom has never been reverted to in the fifteen years that have since elapsed. Now we know that a marked religious and emotional association accompanied the particular custom just mentioned and only the personality of a certain man in a moment of religious enthusiasm brought about the change. Under ordinary conditions a modification of this nature would have been resented and resisted intensely. In this same ceremony are found also a shepherd's crook and a mound of earth called Mount Sinai, which can adequately be explained only when it is known that the leader of the ritual, the one who introduced it from without, belonged to a certain clan that possessed two sticks shaped something like a shepherd's crook and that he was actually the keeper of these two emblems; that it was likewise the custom of a certain ritual to which he belonged