418 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s. t I, 1899
attitude must have been the earliest of the specifically human at- tributes in order of development, since it is essentially biotic while the others seem to be demotic and traceable to its influence. Accordingly the progenitors of human kind must have associated face to face and hand to hand, and developed — howsoever unconsciously and crudely — ideals of comeliness based on stature and facial feature and gesture ; and, for the first time in the history of the world, the supremely intense effort of vitality to perpetuate its own stream was marked by full sight of the trans- figured face of the mate, with eye speaking to eye and voice to voice in eloquent expression of intellectual choice. Such may well have been the real beginning of humanization ; and from the beginning it has seldom been the average beings who have begotten progeny, but the momentarily inspired — yea, glorified — pair whose excellences of manhood and womanhood are caught in mutual apotheosis to be carried up the stream of life and made better with each succeeding generation. If the ideals of a physio- logic moment be perpetuated, as Moses taught, and as most primitive tribes believe, then Goethe dreamed wiser than he knew of the elective affinities, and the modern student may bridge the broad break between beast and man — may explain the quick-grown comeliness of his kind even unto the elimination of bestial bristles and dermal pigments, may understand the exal- tation of love, the rise and ramifications of romance through song and story, and the development of the strongest collective ties ; yet, whether he adopt the interpretation or not, he cannot gainsay the great facts of human progress conjoined by the hypothesis.
A conspicuous though much neglected fact in the somatic development of mankind is hybridization, or rather consanguini- zation, whereby tribal and racial boundaries are constantly broken down. Among most primitive peoples intertribal mating is regulated by surprisingly comprehensive laws, which commonly prohibit intermarriage within certain groups and without certain
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