BOOK REVIEWS 283
presence of the bullroarer in America, Australia, and Africa so long as the object itself was alone concerned, but when he finds that in all three places the object is used as a means of excluding women from ceremonial, he does not hesitate, in the light of our present knowledge, to accept diffusion as more probable than independent origin. In another place he remarks that it cannot be an accident that all the suggestions of the sexual dichotomy of society in North America are reported from the Pacific coast, this feature of the relation of the sexes being characteristic of the cultures which lie on the other side of the Pacific ocean. Again, he points out several resemblances (to which others could readily be added) in the institution of chieftainship in Polynesia and among the Indians of the Northwest, and only rejects the significance of the resemblance because of the general difference of character of the two cultures, an example of the argument which has just been considered. These examples show very clearly how Dr. Lowie has been influenced by the limitation of his outlook to the process of borrowing. His concessions are such as might possibly come into the category of borrowing, but do not impress one who takes the more dynamic view so much as the basic similarity between so many of the customs and institutions of North-America and those of other parts of the world. To one who takes the wider view these cumulative similarities are far more impressive than the wide distribution of a special kind of noise to frighten women.
I hope that my failure to deal sympathetically with one feature of Dr. Lowie's book will not be allowed to obscure my great appreciation of it as a whole. The views which I have criticised form only a minor feature of a book which will be of the greatest value to students as a record of early forms of social institution. If it is not greedy to ask for more where so much has already been given, I should like to express the wish that Dr. Lowie will give us another book dealing, in the same manner but more fully, with the facts and problems of the sociology of aboriginal America. It is a great merit of the present book that it supplements the invaluable work of Dr. Clark Wissler on The American Indian where that book is weakest. Dr. Lowie's book contains many instances of American sociology which the student of other regions of the earth would find it difficult to extract from the vast mass of material collected by the industry of American ethnologists. If Dr. Lowie would give us another book on American society, dealing, for instance, with the problems raised by the nomenclature of relationship and giving in more detail the evidence bearing on the time-order of different forms of social organization, he would confer a great boon on all those interested in the history of social institutions. W. H. R. Rivers
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