the Chukchee do not ride reindeer-back since their variety seems physically unfit for the saddle. That, however, is not the essential point. We should like to know how the Tungus came to use the saddle with their animals while other tribes with the same variety did not do so, and for this positive reaction to their faunal environment geography furnishes no clue. A similar group of questions arises in connection with the horse. Wild horses were game animals in Solutrean times in Europe, their flesh forming in fact the staple diet. Domestication certainly set in at a very much later period and its economic consequences vary appreciably with different peoples and in different times. The Kirgis, for example, milk their mares, thus obtaining the famous kumyss, though the operation is difficult and even dangerous.[4-iii] The ancient Babylonians, Chinese, and East Indians used the horse as a draught-animal harnessed to war-chariots. Its use for riding was an invention of Central Asiatic nomads. In the most recent period the consumption of horse flesh is a matter of course among the poorer classes of continental Europe, revolting as the idea is not only to the white American but to some of the Plains Indians as well, according to the testimony of some of my informants. There is thus no such thing as the presence of the horse determining its cultural use in a definite sense.

Again, the ancient Chinese kept both sheep and goats, but the idea of utilizing wool for clothing was foreign to them. We have historical evidence for the fact that the use of wool for felt and rugs was taught to the Chinese in more recent times by the nomadic populations of central Asia. Most startling of all perhaps is the different attitude assumed in different countries towards cattle. To us nothing seems more obvious than that cattle should be kept both for meat and dairy products. This, however, is by no means a universal practice. The Zulu and other Bantu tribes of South Africa use milk extensively but hardly ever slaughter their animals except on festive occasions. On the other hand, we have the even more astonishing fact that Eastern Asiatics, such as the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Indo-Chinese, have an inveterate aversion to the use of milk. Though the Chinese, as Dr. Laufer points out, have raised a variety of animals from which milk could be derived and have been in constant contact with Turkish and Mongol nations whose staple food consists in dairy products, they have never acquired what seems so obvious and useful an economic practice. Accordingly, Dr. Laufer justifiably concludes that “our consumption of animal milk cannot be looked upon as a self-evident and spontaneous phenomenon, for which it has long been taken, but that it is a mere matter of educated force of habit.”[5-iii] In other words, the use of environmental factors is not an automatic and necessary response to them but varies with the culture of the peoples concerned.

The creative impotence of environment and more particularly the subordinate part it plays as compared with purely cultural determinants of culture, such as the influence of a certain trait in a neighboring tribe or the preëxistence of indigenous cultural features, may be instructively illustrated by several other instances.