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Stories of culture and place: an introduction
to anthropology
Author(s) Kenny, Michael; Smillie, Kirsten

Imprint University of Toronto Press, 2017

ISBN 9781487593704, 9781487593728

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 Stories of Culture and Place

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This page intentionally left blank
 STORIES
of CULTURE AND PLACE
An Introduction to Anthropology
second edition

Michael G. Kenny and Kirsten Smillie

BK-UTP-KENNY_HE-170243-Kenny.indd 3 06/10/17 6:54 PM

Copyright © University of Toronto Press 2017

Higher Education Division

www.utorontopress.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means,
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Licensing Agency) 320–56 Wellesley Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S3—is an infringement of the
copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Kenny, Michael, 1942–, author

Stories of culture and place : an introduction to anthropology/Michael
G. Kenny and Kirsten Smillie.—Second edition.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4875-9370-4 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4875-9371-1(EPUB).—
ISBN 978-1-4875-9372-8 (PDF)

1. Anthropology—Textbooks. 2. Textbooks. I. Smillie, Kirsten, 1979–,

author II. Title.

GN25.K46 2017   301   C2017-903610-6
               C2017-903611-4

We welcome comments and suggestions regarding any aspect of our publications—please feel free to contact
us at [email protected] or visit our Internet site at www.utorontopress.com.

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The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund.

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi

Chapter 1 The Story of Anthropology: The “New” World 1

Chapter 2 History in Context 29
Chapter 3 Culture Shock 53
Chapter 4 Making a Living 73
Chapter 5 The Ties That Bind: Kinship and the Social Order 91
Chapter 6 Symbol, Myth, and Meaning 115
Chapter 7 Health, Medicine, and Society 139
Chapter 8 Gender and Social Expectations 163
Chapter 9 Race, Science, and Human Diversity 185
Chapter 10 The Politics of Culture 211
Chapter 11 Anthropology, Cultural Change, and Globalization 237

Conclusion 265
Glossary 267
References 273
Sources 291
Index 293

v
This page intentionally left blank
Illustrations

Plates
1.1 Hawaiian Temple 8
1.2 James Teit and Lucy Antko 12
1.3 Robert Fitzroy 14
1.4 Charles Darwin 15
1.5 Indigenous Fuegian 16
1.6 Indigenous Australians 19
1.7 Lewis Henry Morgan 24
2.1 Bronislaw Malinowski 32
2.2 Franz Boas 42
2.3 Margaret Mead, with Manus Mother and Child 45
3.1 Anthropologist Charlotte Whitby-Coles in India 55
5.1 Cave of the Patriarchs 98
5.2 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown 100
5.3 Trail of Tears 109
6.1 Marcel Mauss 120
6.2 A Dinka Man: South Sudan 121
6.3 Ruth Benedict 123
6.4 President Obama and Emperor Akihito 125
6.5 Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard 127
6.6 Émile Durkheim 131
7.1 Cover of a Ministerio de Sanidad y Asistencia Social (MSAS) Health Education
Pamphlet on Cholera 157
7.2 Drawings That Appeared Side by Side in a Health Education Pamphlet by the
Venezuelan National Guard 158
8.1 Children in Gender-Specific Hallowe’en Costumes 169
8.2 Hijra 178
9.1 Evolutionary Tree 188
9.2 Anthropometry 189
9.3 Races of Europe 190
9.4 Mtesa 201
9.5 King of Rwanda 203
10.1 Nootka Village 215
10.2 Nootka House 216
10.3 Nuu-chah-nulth Whaler’s Shrine Figure 219
10.4 Makah Whaler 222
10.5 Gitksan Village 225

vii
ILLUSTRATIONS

10.6 Greenpeace Protester 231

11.1 Burmese Refugees Waiting to Be Registered by a Thai Policeman 244
11.2 Korean Children with Their American Parents 248

Maps
1.1 Cook’s Third Voyage 6
1.2 The Pacific Northwest: Simon Fraser’s Journey 11
2.1 Zambia 34
2.2 Samoa 44
3.1 Iraq 59
7.1 Venezuela 155
11.1 Haiti 253
11.2 Madagascar 256

Figure
5.1 Iroquois Kinship 105

viii
Acknowledgements

We first of all acknowledge Anne Brackenbury, our editor at the University of Toronto
Press, for her enthusiasm and encouragement over the course of this project. Fulsome
thanks to the team at University of Toronto Press for their input and feedback, and to
the anonymous reviewers of the first edition.
Kirsten Smillie would like to thank Dusty, Georgia, and Charlie for all their love
and support.
Michael Kenny thanks Angela Tai for being there, and his long-time colleagues in
the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University for their
intellectual stimulation over the years.

ix
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

This book aims at providing you with an overview of social and cultural
anthropology—its origins, its distinctive methods and concepts, and its place in the
contemporary world. Anthropology is a rich and diverse subject, so it’s difficult to give
a precise definition of just what anthropology is. We think this end is far better served
by seeing what it does, and that is our goal. You can then judge for yourself. However,
to get things started, we should at least say the following.
What we now know as anthropology arose out of contact between western
Europeans and the strange new worlds that were encountered during the great age
of overseas exploration and imperial expansion. Previously unknown societies were
“discovered,” the true map of the globe outlined, new trade routes established, and
colonies founded. It was suddenly a much bigger world, and those events are the
prelude to the story we want to tell. In its beginnings, anthropology is inevitably a
Eurocentric story, but that would change.
Travelers, empire builders, missionaries, and scholars asked themselves how these
new peoples and their unfamiliar customs fit into the broader scheme of things—
their place in history, their status as human beings, and the value of their cultures.
Anthropology as an academic discipline emerged from attempts to answer questions
such as these. Encounters with human diversity provoked reflection and stimulated
further inquiry; these new worlds turned out to be incredibly diverse, ranging from
small bands of hunter-gatherers to centralized empires.
As for theory, it shapes the questions one thinks worth asking, so theory, observa-
tion, and practice are intimately related. Even in the early days it came to be seen
that much could be gained by comparing societies with one another in a systematic
manner—that light could be shed on human nature and history by doing so. Anthro-
pology was in the process of becoming a scientific endeavor, and this entailed the
development of methods for analyzing, classifying, and comparing.
The most natural way to go about it was by comparing other societies with
one’s own. But difference, after all, is in the eye of the beholder! Conceptions about
the nature of the non-European world were therefore an inverted mode of self-
perception, seeing oneself through the other. One expression of this was a tendency
to place particular societies on a scale ranging from the “primitive” to the “civi-
lized.” This progressive scale had a historical dimension. Europeans imagined that
so-called primitive peoples resembled what their own ancestors had been like in the
distant past, which, in turn, raised the question of what historical processes were

xi
PREFACE

responsible for differentiating peoples, making some more “progressive” and oth-
ers less so. This scale was a fertile but misguided idea. Be that as it may, so-called
primitive peoples were once the distinctive object of anthropological inquiry, stud-
ied with the hope of casting light on earlier stages of social evolution, or even on
the essence of humanity in its purist, simplest, most natural form. They were seen
as a laboratory of human possibility, the beginning point for everything that fol-
lowed. That is still a common stereotype about our subject, and it’s not entirely
wrong.
But the world has moved on, and so has the discipline: it has gone global and,
as an academic discipline, is now found everywhere with a much broader range of
interests than its traditional subject—tribal societies. Contemporary anthropologists
regularly turn their research lens on those who are “just like them,” and they thus
contribute to a better understanding of social issues that plague contemporary times,
such as poverty, discrimination, and environmental degradation. Anthropologists are
also regularly employed outside the world of academia, in fields including develop-
ment, health, government, and law. In this text we will explore how the history of
anthropology has shaped the discipline into what we see today, and how the lessons
learned along the way have contributed to the development of a social science that
is relevant, critical, and pertinent to understanding the world we live in. As you will
see, some of our examples are taken virtually from yesterday’s news. Of course, the
world moves on, and what counts as newsworthy moves with it. We encourage you,
therefore, to think about contemporary events from an anthropological perspective.

Our Approach

The typical introductory anthropology textbook is fat, heavy, expensive, and attempts
a comprehensive overview of the field with many examples illustrating particular
issues. Our experience suggests that students (and instructors!) often find such an
approach deeply boring, so we have opted for another. For many of you, this may be
your first and last formal contact with anthropology. No hard feelings; that’s often
the case with introductory courses, and then you move on to other things. What we
hope to leave you with is a sense of what anthropology is all about and of its relevance
to other aspects of life and academic endeavor. But some of you may be stimulated to
go on and find out more; if so, all the better.
Given those facts of life, our view is that a few well-chosen examples are better
than many superficial ones that can be memorized and quickly forgotten. Therefore,
in each chapter we focus on a few specific cases that open up a discussion of the intel-
lectual themes and wider anthropological issues involved. Each chapter of this book
will follow a similar mode of presentation: beginning with a statement of what we
intend to accomplish, followed by examples and discussion, concluding with a sum-
mary of the main points.

xii
 PREFACE

Outline

Chapter 1: The Story of Anthropology: The “New” World What anthropology is

all about, a few key terms, and a brief overview of sub-disciplines; narratives of three
early “first contact” encounters between European explorers and non-Western cultures;
an overview of the social evolutionary approach that characterizes much of nineteenth-
century anthropological theory.
Chapter 2: History in Context Continues the historical account in Chapter 1;
including the twentieth-century British anthropological approach known as “func-
tionalism,” and the emergence of “cultural anthropology” in North America.
Chapter 3: Culture Shock Examines the nature of the anthropological experience
through examples of life in the field.
Chapter 4: Making a Living Anthropological studies of economic life; basic con-
cepts such as exchange and reciprocity; “cultural ecology”; hunting-gathering; cer-
emonial exchange; working.
Chapter 5: The Ties That Bind: Kinship and the Social Order The importance
of the study of kinship to anthropology; how we view and construct human relation-
ships; kinship systems; kinship in our own time.
Chapter 6: Symbol, Myth, and Meaning Culture as a cognitive system; the social
construction of the world and our place in it; the problem of language.
Chapter 7: Health, Medicine, and Society The origin and nature of “medical
anthropology”; concepts of illness and their practical implications; biomedicine as a
cultural system.
Chapter 8: Gender and Social Expectations Problems of definition; biology,
sexuality, and gender; gender roles.
Chapter 9: Race, Science, and Human Diversity Why “race” matters; the rise
of genetic essentialism; eugenics—taking control of evolution; the anthropological
critique of race; race in the post-genomic age.
Chapter 10: The Politics of Culture Human rights; cultural identities and cul-
tural property; alternative histories; land claims; applied anthropology; anthropolo-
gists as advocates and activists.
Chapter 11: Anthropology, Cultural Change, and Globalization We’ve always
been global; the global and the local; colonialism; “modernization” and “develop-
ment”; information technologies old and new; migration; caught between worlds;
implications for anthropology as a discipline.

Preface to the Second Edition

The first edition of this book was published in 2015 and very favorably received.
Nevertheless everything is capable of improvement. To that end, the University of
Toronto Press sought the input of a number of outside reviewers with experience in

xiii
PREFACE

teaching introductory anthropology who have kindly provided comments on our text.
They made some valuable suggestions that we have incorporated into this edition. Our
account of the history and development of anthropology follows a more chronological
approach than previously, and some new material has been added. It was also thought
that the book would benefit from inclusion of chapters on economic life and medical
anthropology. This we have done (Chapter 4: Making a Living; Chapter 7: Health,
Medicine, and Society). Otherwise the text is largely unchanged, though there have
been some rearrangements or abridgements and the chapter sequence has been altered.
Michael G. Kenny
Kirsten Smillie

xiv
CHAPTER 1

The Story of Anthropology:

The “New” World

learning objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to

• describe the four major sub-fields of anthropology and identify what makes
cultural anthropology unique as a discipline;
• identify and explain the key research methods of cultural anthropologists,
including participant observation, fieldwork, reflexive thinking;
• outline the historical context that helped give rise to the anthropological
perspective on cultural difference;
• explore the relationship between theory and observation of the social world—
what is seen and how it’s seen;
• explain the difference between the persectives of early colonial explorers and that
of anthropology;
• understand concepts like “civilization” and “savagery” in the earlier history of
our subject;
• understand the significance of the nature of history and social evolution to the
development of anthropology;
• understand the “comparative method” and the kinds of insights that can be
gained by comparing one society with another;
• explain why the question of “meaning” is important to anthropology, and how
difficult the problem of “interpretation” can be;
• outline how Darwin’s experiences with the people of Tierra del Fuego were
central to his understanding of social progress;

1
STORIES OF CULTURE AND PLACE

• describe the “myth of the savage” and its influence on eighteenth-century

anthropology, including its biblical origins and interpretations by the
philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau;
• discuss how social theorists used observations of peoples such as the Aboriginal
Australians and the Fuegians to illustrate social evolutionism; and
• summarize the work of Lewis Henry Morgan and explain what differentiates his
theory of social evolutionism from other social evolutionists.

key terms
archaeology reflexive thinking meaning
holistic social memory interpretation
linguistic anthropology State of Nature social evolutionary scale
physical anthropology globalization value

“We cannot escape history”—Abraham Lincoln (1862)

Introdution

Society is a moving target, and anthropology has moved with it, undergoing its own theo-
retical development in the process. In this chapter, we will provide a brief introduction to
the discipline, with some key terms including a description of the four fields, the broad
aim of cultural anthropology and the research methods employed. We will then consider
the historical background to a number of important trends in anthropological thought,
and provide examples of each as they took shape in actual research. We should point out,
however, that we’re emphasizing the story of how anthropology developed in the English-
speaking world, and make relatively little mention of other national traditions.
It is our hope that, by the end, you will have acquired a fair overview of what
modern socio-cultural anthropology is all about, and will be in a position to ask
anthropological questions yourselves. We seek to illuminate the history and nature of
a discipline and to document the emergence of a particular way of seeing. Call it the
anthropological perspective. But we won’t try to define just what that is. As we said
in the Preface, that end is better served by seeing what anthropology does—through
examples of anthropology in practice.

What Do Anthropologists Do?

What do anthropologists study? And what do they do with their findings? Most popu-
lar representations of anthropologists have them digging bones and fossils in exotic
locations, or studying secluded tribes in the South Pacific. While both these portrayals

2
 THE STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

are true, they do not begin to describe the diversity of subjects that anthropologists
turn their lens on. The term anthropology encompasses four sub-disciplines that, on
the surface, appear to have very little in common with one another. What unifies
these sub-disciplines, however, is a desire to understand humankind. We will focus
exclusively on social and cultural anthropology, the study of human culture, social
organization, and behavior. Because it is just as useful to know what one is not study-
ing as it is to know what one is studying, we will briefly define the three other major
areas associated with the discipline.
Physical anthropologists seek to understand human variation, adaptation, and
change. Physical anthropology was once preoccupied with questions about the nature
of “race,” with classifying people according to their perceived physical types and
explaining what such differences mean in historical terms. Physical anthropologists
have moved on since those days, and, as you’ll see, a critique of the concept of race
was one of the formative influences on anthropology as it is practiced now. Today’s
physical anthropologists can be found studying nutritional issues in Africa, examining
pre-human fossil remains, or using genomic evidence to reconstruct ancient human
migrations. Two sub-fields of physical anthropology include primatology, the study
of non-human primates and how their behavior and genetic composition compare
with those of humans, and forensic anthropology, the focus on human skeletal remains
found at crime scenes and at the site of accidents. Archaeology shares many research
interests and methodological approaches with physical anthropology. Broadly speak-
ing, archaeologists study the material remains of past cultures, but not exclusively.
“Garbage Archaeologists” on Staten Island near New York City, for example, have been
examining the Fresh Kills landfill to understand recent consumption practices and
the rate of decomposition of materials. Finally, linguistic anthropology explores the
relation between culture and language. Linguistic anthropologists explore everything
from the structure, origin, and development of languages to the relationship between
language and social interaction. Linguistic anthropologists are also interested in explor-
ing how communication is influenced by technology, such as email, social media, cell
phones, and text messaging.
The focal points of the four sub-fields of anthropology are clearly very different
from one another, and as one might expect, the methods employed to collect, ana-
lyze, and interpret these data also vary considerably. Socio-cultural anthropology is
primarily regarded as a social science, a classification based upon the type of research
questions asked, the research methods used, and the approaches employed to analyze
data. Throughout this text, we will explore these research components as they relate to
pertinent topics such as gender, race, religion, and globalization.
Cultural anthropologists want to know how the elements in a cultural system are
related to one another, and how they are expressed in individual lives. When we try to
account for the behavior of other people, what we are really asking is: What does their
behavior mean? What do they intend by it? What institutional structures constrain
and direct it? What makes it sensible, rather than just random or crazy? Culture is a

3
STORIES OF CULTURE AND PLACE

system of meaning; it provides the standards of value through which action is judged
and is usually an unconscious, taken-for-granted reality for the people who share it. It
is one thing to experience a new city or country, meet new people or try a new activity,
and quite another to consider how one will interpret or manage these experiences and
findings so that others can make sense of them. For many anthropologists, considering
how their own opinions and beliefs influence the way they see the people and activities
around them is as important as considering how their participants might view these
things. This is called reflexive thinking, and in a discipline in which the researcher is
the instrument, it is extremely important.
Contemporary anthropologists seek to understand the similarities and differences
between human cultures. Deconstructing the social world to fit into neat patterns
and simple governing laws, as was the approach of early anthropologists, has largely
been abandoned. Anthropologists conduct fieldwork in a specific location or with a
specific group of people to gain an understanding of why they behave the way they do.
Through participant observation, or joining and engaging in the culture and customs
of the people who are the focus of one’s study over an extended period of time, the
anthropologist gains a holistic understanding of how the group works. How are social
institutions related to one another in society? How does the economy impact the
political system, and vice versa? Is religion a prominent feature in society, and why or
why not? Is society highly stratified along class lines, or is it fairly egalitarian?
The presence of an anthropologist in a community has a recognized impact on
the way in which people act. Any account of an event, issue or group of people is a
re-telling by a person who has their own values, beliefs, and experiences that influence
what they see and how they see it. No matter how long one stays in the field and gets
to know one’s participants, one’s own life experiences and worldview will affect what
one deems important to document and discuss, and what one does not. Many cultural
anthropologists will identify how their own life experiences and biases impact their
observations.
The best way to gain an understanding of what anthropologists do, and how they
do it, is to explore the product of their fieldwork and research. This is often presented
as ethnography, a theoretically informed description and explanation of a way of life or
activity. We will explore a number of ethnographic studies in this book, but before we do,
we will consider the origins of the discipline itself, in terms of the philosophical thought
that governed the day, the key players who were exploring new and exciting areas of study,
and the topics that ignited their interest. In order to understand contemporary anthropol-
ogy, we must consider the foundation on which the discipline was built.

The New World

This may well be your first encounter with anthropology, and so we begin with stories
of three first-contact experiences: that of Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy with

4
 THE STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

the Hawaiians in 1778; of the Canadian fur trader, Simon Fraser, with the Indigenous
inhabitants of interior British Columbia during an 1808 journey down the great
river that bears his name; and finally that of Charles Darwin’s encounter with the
Indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America dur-
ing the famous voyage of HMS Beagle in 1832–35. Encounters such as these altered
the course of history.
Cook, Fraser, and Darwin were not anthropologists. The emergence of our sub-
ject was in their future. At their best they were meticulous observers, and this tells
us something about the difference between their perspective and that of modern
anthropology. There’s little sense of how Indigenous peoples viewed them, and what
their own world looked like from within. It’s mainly a one-sided story that these
explorers tell, from a “superior” outsider’s perspective. Of course these were travelers
who didn’t come to stay. True enough, but we will show that this perspective was
built into how Europeans of their time saw the world and its history. That would
change as anthropology developed as a discipline and as the world changed around
it. Broadly speaking, it can be said that the “anthropological perspective” has evolved
from observation of “the others” to both collaboration and advocacy with regard to
human and environmental rights.

The Islands of Paradise

On Monday, January 19, 1778, Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy unexpectedly
came across the Hawaiian Islands during his third Pacific expedition. The first two
voyages (1768–71; 1772–75) had been sponsored by the British Royal Society, which
was founded in the 1660s to promote the advancement of natural knowledge, and still
exists today. These trips made Cook a famous man; their by-product was the expan-
sion of the Empire into Australia and New Zealand. The third voyage was aimed at
establishing whether or not there was a usable northwest passage: an ice-free sea-route
across northern Canada to the Atlantic Ocean and Europe. This time, commercial
interests had a hand in the game, notably the Hudson’s Bay Company, which sought
to advance its fur trade in the region.
Cook’s ships, Resolution and Discovery, made landfall in Hawai’i on their way up
from Tahiti. Their goal was the northwest coast of North America and the Bering
Strait. Even though the Spanish had long been sailing the Pacific from Mexico to
the Philippines, no Europeans had ever crossed at this latitude. No one knew of the
Hawaiians, not even the closely related peoples of Tahiti and the other Polynesian
Islands to the south; nor did the Hawaiians know of them, and it is possible that there
had been no outside contact for hundreds of years (Beaglehole 1974: 574). Cook first
stopped at the island of Kaua’i, these days a popular tourist destination:

At this time we were in some doubt whether or no the land before [us] was
inhabited, this doubt was soon cleared up, by seeing some Canoes coming off

5
STORIES OF CULTURE AND PLACE

MAP 1.1 Cook’s Third Voyage

from the shore towards the Ship .… There were three and four men in each and
we were agreeably surprised to find them of the same Nation as the people of
Otahiete and the other islands we had lately visited. […] I never saw Indians
so much astonished at the entering of a ship before, their eyes were continually
flying from object to object, the wildness of their looks and actions fully express’d
their surprise and astonishment at the several new objects before them and
evinced that they never had been on board a ship before. (Cook 1967: 263–64)

Cook then went ashore himself near the present town of Waimea, where his statue
now stands. He found the Hawaiians very hospitable and ready to trade just about
anything for pieces of iron: “The very instant I leaped ashore, they all fell flat on
their faces, and remained in that humble posture till I made signs to them to rise ….
This, as I afterwards understood, is done to their great chiefs” (Cook 1967: 269). He
had encountered a hierarchical society of a type already familiar to him from other
Polynesian islands (1967: 284). Noting many similarities of language and culture,
Cook asked himself, “How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over
this vast ocean? We find them from New Zealand to the south, to these islands to the
North and from Easter Island to the Hebrides; an extent of 60° of latitude … and 83°
of longitude … how much further is not known” (1967: 279).
James Cook was a meticulous observer, with a keen eye for religious practice and
other things:

We observed at every Village one or more elevated objects. It proved to be a

[heiau—a ritual enclosure] which in many respects was like those of Otaheite .…
It was 4 feet square at the base and about 20 feet high, the four sides was [sic] built

6
 THE STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

of small sticks and branches …. On each side … stood erect some rude carved
boards …. At the foot of these were square places, a little sunk below the common
level and inclosed with stone, these we understood were graves. About the middle
of the [heiau] were three of these places in a line, where we were told three chiefs
had been buried; before them was another that was oblong, this they called …
taboo and gave us clearly to understand that three human sacrifices had been
buried there, that is one at the burial of each chief. (1967: 270)

There were two effigies of goddesses in a nearby structure, and the whole place
was surrounded with an aura of taboo: “sacred, dangerous, set apart”—a term that
entered the English language via the Polynesians, its first recorded use by Captain
Cook himself in 1777. The British had stumbled into a complex symbolic world of
myth and ritual, as became evident when Cook was treated like a god on the Big
Island of Hawai’i upon his return from the north Pacific in November 1778.
What happened in the meantime is a story in itself. Resolution and Discovery
departed Kaua’i with an ample supply of fresh water and foodstuffs that they had
traded for with the Hawaiians. They reached the coast of North America near the
Straits of Juan de Fuca between what is now Washington State and Vancouver Island
in British Columbia. Cook missed the strait and sailed up the west coast of the Island
to Nootka Sound, where they met the people who now know themselves as the
Nuu-chah-nulth (“along the mountains and sea”). They lived in houses made of boards,
mainly subsisted on the products of the sea, and also had a keen interest in acquiring
metal. We will return to them again.
Cook’s ships then passed through the Aleutian Islands and circumnavigated
the Bering Sea up to the edge of the Arctic ice pack. After encounters with local
Indigenous peoples and with Russians on the Siberian side, Cook headed back to
Hawai’i before winter set in. This time it was to the Big Island, where the British
were astonished to find snow-capped mountains (Mauna Loa, 10,000 ft.; Mauna Kea,
13,000 ft.). They went ashore in Kealakekua Bay, on the famous Kona Coast.
What happened next raises persistent questions about just what sort of being the
Hawaiians took James Cook to be. His own diaries become spotty at this point, but
they are supplemented by the journals of his officers, in this case by Lieutenant James
King of the Resolution. Cook had established some degree of rapport with local men of
evident importance, who now wanted him to participate in a ceremony:

We landed on the Beech, & were receiv’d by 3 or 4 men who held wands tipt
with dogs hair, & who kept repeating a sentence, wherein the word Erono was
always mention’d, this is the name by which the Captn has for some time been
distinguish’d by the Natives. At the [north] end of this beach is a Village, on
the other an oblong pile of Stones & between a grove of Coco nut trees, with a
stone wall separating it from the Beech; Not a Soul but those I have mention’d
were to be seen on the beech, but close round the huts we saw numbers of

7
STORIES OF CULTURE AND PLACE

the Inhabitants Prostrate, as they were at our first Visit at [Kaua’i]. We were
conducted to the top of the pile of stones …. There was a stout Railing all
round, on which there were stuck 20 Skulls, the most of which they gave us to
understand were those of [Maui] men, whom they had killd on the death of
some Chief .… There were 12 Images ranged in a semicircular form & fronting
these opposite the Center figure was a [rotten] hog, placed on a stand …. On
one side were two wooden Images; between these the Captain was seated ….
[The priest] kept repeating in a very quick tone some speeches or prayers, to
which the rest responded … till at last he repeat’d only two or three words at
a time & was answerd by the Croud repeating the Word Erono. (Cook 1967:
505–6)

The Lieutenant and his Captain were obliged to attempt to eat morsels of the
rotten pig. King was mystified by “this long, & rather tiresome ceremony, of which we
could only guess at its Object and Meaning, only that it was highly respectful on their
parts, & seemed to promise us every assistance they could afford us” (1967: 506–7).
Lieutenant King’s puzzlement about what was going on here raises a central anthro-
pological issue: the problem of meaning and interpretation. How is a ritual of this
sort to be understood? What is the nature of a concept such as “taboo”? Who or what
was “Erono,” and why was Captain Cook associated with this being in the eyes of the
Hawaiians? As Cook’s biographer wrote, “we may not unnaturally ask … why Cook
should have received such extraordinary notice at this particular island” (1967: 657).
We’ll return to such questions in Chapter 6.

PLATE 1.1 Hawaiian Temple

8
 THE STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

These questions take on added force given the unfortunate events that followed.
After Captain Cook had been treated virtually like a god, the Resolution and Discovery
took their leave but were forced to return within a week because of a broken mast.
This time things didn’t go well at all. Cook ended up in a dispute with the locals over
the theft of a small boat; he and several others were killed in an attempt to get the boat
back. His body was taken inland and dismembered, and his shipmates were only able
to retrieve some of the parts. What was left of Captain Cook was put in a coffin and
buried at sea in Kealakekua Bay, which had been placed under a do-not-enter taboo by
a local lord so as to prevent further hostilities. As Lieutenant King reported, “we now
assurd him we were entirely their friends, & as the Erono was buried all recollection
of the affair was also buried” (1967: 567). A monument to Captain Cook now stands
near where he was killed; it is considered extra-territorial British property.
As for Hawai’i itself, in 1810, the islands were unified into one kingdom by
Kamehameha the Great. In 1893, the kingdom was overthrown in a bloodless coup
organized by a group of American planters and merchants (see Daws 1968). In 1959,
Hawai’i was admitted to the American Union as the 50th state. If you travel around
the islands these days you may occasionally see the original Hawaiian flag flying by
the roadside. A local man explained that it was to protest the illegal American seizure
of the islands and to agitate for the restoration of the kingdom. On his t-shirt was
written, “My people killed Captain Cook.” Over the years Cook became for some
“a symbol of the colonialism, dispossession and oppression that sometimes followed
in the wake of his explorations” (Williams 2008: 172). As one radical said, “the best
part of Cook’s visit was that we killed him … we can defend our honour by declaring
that we rid the world of another evil white man” (Williams 2008: 170, 172). In 2015
Native Hawaiian protestors and their allies effectively blocked the construction of a
huge telescope at the observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, which they regard as
a sacred mountain; the project may find a new home on the Canary Islands off the
west coast of Africa.

Simon Fraser’s Journey

River geography was of great interest to fur-traders, such as Simon Fraser. He was
born in 1776 in New York State, moved to Quebec as a teenager, and was commis-
sioned by a Montreal-based fur company to search out new opportunities in the far
West. He knew about the discoveries of previous expeditions, but what lay between
the Prairies and the coast remained unclear. There had been reports of a major river
beyond the Rockies, and Fraser undertook to determine whether or not it was in fact
the Columbia, which had been partially explored by George Vancouver in 1791–92
and the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805–06.
Fraser and his party traveled by canoe down that uncharted river in the spring
of 1808, encountering numerous Indigenous groups along the way. Fraser regarded

9
STORIES OF CULTURE AND PLACE

himself as “English” and he called his canoemen “Canadians”; they were probably
Métis, men of mixed French Canadian and Indigenous ancestry. He kept a detailed
journal, while Native people living in the vicinity of the present town of Lytton kept
alive memories of the first European they had ever seen. The following quote records
Fraser’s reaction to their encounter.

At 8 A.M. set out … The natives ferried us over a large rapid river [the Stein
River]. I obtained, for an awl, a passage to the next village, a distance of three
miles through strong rapids. The others who went by land met some of
the Indians on the way who were happy to see them. The Indians of this village
may be about four hundred souls and some of them appear very old; they live
among mountains and enjoy pure air, seem cleanly inclined, and make use of
wholesome food. We observed several European articles among them, viz. a
copper Tea Kettle, a brass camp kettle, a strip of common blanket, and clothing
such as the Cree women wear. These things, we supposed, were brought from
out settlement beyond the [Rocky] Mountains. Indeed the Indians made us
understand as much.
After having remained some time in this village, the principal chief invited
us over the river. We crossed, and he received us at the waterside, where, assist-
ed by several others, he took me by the arms and conducted me in a moment
up the hill to the camp where his people were sitting in rows, to the number
of twelve hundred; and I had to shake hands with all of them. Then the Great
chief made a long harangue, in course of which he pointed to the sun, to the
four quarters of the world, and then to us, and then he introduced his father,
who was old and blind, and was carried by another man, who also made a
harangue of some length. The old man was placed near us, and with some emo-
tion often stretched out both his hands in order to feel ours.
The natives have many chiefs and great men, appear to be good orators, for their
manner of delivery is extremely handsome. We had every reason to be thankful
for our reception at this place; the Indians shewed us every possible attention and
supplied our wants as much as they could. We had salmon, berries, oil and roots in
abundance, and our men had six dogs. Our tent was pitched near the camp and we
enjoyed peace and security during our stay. (Fraser 1960: 86–87)

In 1900 the story of Fraser’s visit was recounted to James Teit, a Scottish immi-
grant who had married into a local family. Teit was a self-taught anthropologist who
became an associate of Professor Franz Boas of Columbia University in New York, and
wrote extensively on the interior peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Boas was a central
figure in the early history of North American anthropology, and we’ll see him again
in Chapter 2. The following quotation gives us an Indigenous perspective on Fraser’s
1808 account. It was related to Teit by Semalitsa, a woman of the Slaka’pamux First
Nation, who was living near the present town of Lytton, BC.

10
 THE STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

MAP 1.2 The Pacific Northwest: Simon Fraser’s Journey

My grandmother told me that when she was a young girl she was playing
one day in the summer-time (about the time the service-berries get ripe) near
the river beach at the village of [Stein], when she saw two canoes, with red
flags hoisted, come downstream. She ran and told her mother, and the people
gathered to see the strange sight. Seeing so many people gathered, the canoes
put ashore and several men came ashore. Each canoe carried a number of men,
and many of them wore strange dresses, and everything about them was strange.
Some of the men looked like Indians, and others looked like what we call white
men. Among them was a Shuswap chief who acted as interpreter. Our people
were not afraid of the strangers, nor were they hostile to them. The strangers
produced a large pipe, and had a ceremonial smoke with some of our men.
After distributing a few presents, they boarded their canoes and went on to
Lytton, where they were presented with food of various kinds, and gave in

11
STORIES OF CULTURE AND PLACE

PLATE 1.2 James Teit and Lucy Antko

exchange tobacco, beads, and knives. The Lytton chief … went up the east bank
of the Fraser, and conducted them to his place with considerable ceremony. All
the Lytton people were assembled to meet them, and before they left they had
many talks and smokes with the Indians. The Spence’s Bridge chief ran on foot
all the way [to Lytton] and arrived in time to see the strangers and to deliver a
great speech. The Lytton chief at this time was also a great orator. The Spence’s
Bridge chief was presented with some kind of metal or brass badge, and a hat
worn by the leader of the strangers whom the Indians called “The Sun.” He was
called this because of some kind of shining emblem he wore on his hat or cap,
which resembled the symbol of the Sun. The Indians applied names to most of
the strangers, all taken from some feature of their appearance or from certain
marks or emblems on their clothing. (Wickwire 1994: 8–9)

Fraser had noted unfamiliar cultural practices, such as the speech in which the
orator pointed to the sun and the four quarters of the world. He could not know that

12
 THE STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

later generations in the Lytton area would call him “The Sun” or that some would
remember him as having traveled in company with Coyote, Moon, and Morning
Star. “Coyote” was a powerful figure among interior peoples, the trickster-transformer
who gave the world its present form and was a central character in many local tales.
Some said that Fraser’s visit was foretold by prophets, and even that Fraser was himself
Coyote: “This is the only time Coyote has appeared since the end of the mythological
age” (Wickwire 1994: 10). A more recent and quite different account recalls that some
member of Fraser’s party, perhaps even Fraser himself, had molested a local woman
(Wickwire 1994). That is possible of course, but it may also reflect the tensions that
have arisen between whites and Indigenous peoples since Fraser’s time. History gets
rewritten or retold in the light of present circumstances.
When Fraser’s party reached the river’s mouth, he took latitude measurements and
determined that this new river could not be the Columbia, but was well to the north
of it. They found that things were tense because of raids by the “Indians of the Sea,”
and so headed back upriver again. In years to come the peoples Fraser had encountered
along the way would be confined to small reserves, a tiny fraction of the territory they
had once used freely. The river now bears Fraser’s name.
The contrasting stories of Semalitsa and Fraser point to the topic of social
memory—the social factors affecting recollection and forgetting (see Fentress and
Wickham 1992; Connerton 1989). The written accounts of Cook, Fraser, and
Darwin are stories too—told from the point of view of a particular time and place
and with a particular audience in mind. Sometimes the “truth” of historical accounts
is difficult to judge, and a lot may depend on it. In Semalitsa’s account we see a
process at work whereby long-ago events were assimilated into a First Nations style
of storytelling. Memories of events, by being told and retold, change their shape over
time. Events happen, but what do they mean? By themselves nothing much, unless a
place is found for them in a narrative. It might be tales of heroic deeds, or something
as everyday as shared memories of a family holiday. Things that happened long ago or
even occurred at entirely different times may get absorbed into one story and take on
“mythological” qualities. Much is simply forgotten and lost. The making of “history”
can itself be a very political process, and we’ll revisit that topic in Chapter 10.

Time Travel

In 1826 the British Admiralty dispatched two ships—the Adventure and the
Beagle—to survey the southern coasts and peninsula of South America. This first
voyage of the Beagle lasted four years and took its crew to Tierra del Fuego at the
far southern tip of the continent. They returned home with four native Fuegians
on board, three young men and a girl. Other travelers had encountered Fuegians
before, and had formed an unfavorable opinion of them. These hunter-gatherers
lived in small and sometimes mutually hostile bands, and subsisted off the prod-
ucts of both sea and land. Robert Fitzroy, captain of the Beagle, described them as

13
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 Fig. 18.

Axolotl, a creature living and breeding for generations in

the water. Amblystoma coming out of the water,—an axolotl
which has lost the gills and acquired lungs.

We have, in fact, in Europe real land salamanders, which live in

cool damp places, looking like lumpy soft-skinned lizards, but going
down to the water to lay their eggs, that their little ones may go
59
through their tadpole life—and one of these, the black salamander,
which lives high up in the mountains of Germany, France, and
Switzerland, does not even go to the water, but carries the young
tadpoles in her body till they can breathe air and run alone; and yet
they are still true amphibia, for if they are taken out of their mother
and put in water, they go through all their changes like common efts
and newts.
 Lastly, there is a strange group of legless creatures called
Cæcilians, which have taken refuge underground, burrowing like
worms, though they are true amphibians and their young have gills in
their babyhood hidden under a slit in the neck. These cæcilians are the
only amphibians which have scales something like fishes, yet they
never live in the water, but in the marshy ground of tropical countries,
feeding on worms and insects.

* * * * *
Now when we think that these sluggish newts, and salamanders,
and cæcilians, with their more nimble but comparatively unprotected
relations, the frogs, are all the amphibians now living, we cannot but
wonder how Life came to produce such a feeble set of creatures to
fight the battle of existence.
But if we glance back to that far-off time when the ancient fishes
were wandering round the shores and in the streams of the coal-
forests, we shall be better able to read the riddle. For in those days it
was a great step for an animal to get out of the water at all, and those
that did so had a much better time of it than our frogs and newts have
now, when the country is full of land enemies.
And so we find that the amphibia were not then the small
scattered groups they are now, but strong lusty animals, with
formidable weapons. In the hardened mud, which in those days
formed the soft swampy ground of the coal-forests, but is now
stiffened into the roofs and floors of our coal-mines, footprints have
been left which tell us of large and formidable creeping animals, with
toed feet and long flat tails, dragging themselves over the marshes of
the coal-forests, and finding their way to many places which even the
mud-fish with their paddles could not reach; and from time to time, in
these same roofs and floors of our mines, both here and in America,
we find the bones and coverings of these amphibia, buried in Nature’s
catacombs for ages, and only brought to light by the rude hand of
man.
These remains remind us that
 “A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth,
For him did the high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
And he felt himself in his force to be Nature’s crowning race;”

60
for they show us huge and powerful creatures which sported in the
water or wandered over the land with sprawling limbs, long tails, and
bones on which gills grew, while their heads were covered with hard
bony plates, and their teeth were large, with folds of hard enamel on
the surface. Some of these were fish-like, with short necks and broad
flat tails, but they had true legs and toes; others, more like crocodiles,
and sometimes ten feet long, were able to walk firmly, but still
dragging their bodies and long tails over the swampy ground on which
their footprints are still found; some were small and more like lizards,
with simple teeth, scaly armour, and light nimble bodies; and these,
probably, ran about quickly on the land, and have sometimes left their
skeletons in the hollow trunks of the old coal-forest trees.
All these plated and formidable creatures were amphibia or
double-lived animals, and this was their Golden Age, as they preyed
upon the fishes in the swamps and ponds, probably not sparing even
their nearest connections, the mud-fishes, who, less fortunate than
themselves, had followed the road of fish-life instead of coming out
upon the land. They lived so long ago that we can tell but little of their
daily lives, but it is clear that they played a very different part from our
small frogs and newts of to-day, and in their well-formed limbs were
worthy forerunners of land and air-breathing animals.
But like the old race of fishes these large amphibians were only to
have their day, for as other branches of the family tree grew up, and
reptiles grew strong and mighty, and other true land animals began to
flourish, these huge plated forms dwindled away, and we lose sight of
them; and when we find any of their relations again it is only as our
present frogs and newts, salamanders and cæcilians, which have taken
up their refuge in lakes, ponds, ditches, underground waters, or damp
mud. And, curiously enough, those forms of to-day which are most like
61
the huge Labyrinthodonts, as they are called, of the old coal-forests,
are the feeble cæcilians, with their horny scales and their numerous
ribs, although they have now fallen the lowest of all amphibians, and,
with their sightless eyes and ringed and legless bodies, have taken to
burrowing in the ground like worms.
Not so the frogs, which, like the bony fishes, began their career in
later times, and have known how to fit themselves into many nooks
and corners in life. In almost all countries of the globe they hop
merrily about the ponds and ditches, never wandering far from the
water, into which they jump and dive whenever danger threatens. It is
true they are eaten by thousands, both as tadpoles and frogs, by
birds, snakes, water-rats, and fish, and even by each other, but they
multiply fast enough to keep up the supply, and find plenty of insects
both in and out of the ponds. Nor have they kept entirely to a watery
life, for their near relations, the toads, which have toothless mouths
and toes less webbed, have ventured much farther on to the land,
protected partly, no doubt, by the disagreeable acrid juice which they
can throw out from a gland behind the eye whenever they are
attacked.
It is curious to notice the quiet leisurely waddle of the sluggish
toad, as he spreads out his short fat legs and puffs out his warty skin,
and to compare him with the nervous, anxious, little frog, starting at
every danger. And still more curious is it to see him getting out of his
skin, as he does several times a year. For his skin does not peel off in
pieces as it does in the watery frogs, but splits along his back; then he
wriggles about till it lies in folds on his sides and hips, and, putting one
of his hind feet between the front ones, draws the skin off the leg like
a stocking off a foot. With the other leg he does the same, and then,
drawing out his front legs, pulls the whole skin forward, and stripping
it over his head, swallows it; thus deliberately putting his old coat
inside him, and appearing in one that is glossy, fresh, and new. The
toad has many enemies in spite of his acrid taste, and he shows his
wisdom by hiding in walls and under stones in the daytime, and
coming out in the dusk of evening to hunt the beetles and grubs so
often out of reach of the water-loving frog.
 Fig. 19.

The Flying Tree-Frog of New Guinea62 (Wallace).

But the toad is not the only land relation of the frog; there are
others of the group that venture even farther from water; for in most
parts of the world (though not in England), tree-frogs, with sucking
disks at the ends of their toes and fingers, climb the trees and hunt for
insects among the leaves and branches; while in Borneo Mr. Wallace
found one (Fig. 19) with webbed feet, which it spread out, and so flew
down from the trees. There are plenty of the ordinary tree-climbing
frogs to be seen in the south of France, their small green bodies
peeping out from under the dull gray olive-leaves; and to be heard,
too, in an endless chorus all night long when the spring arrives.
 But how can these tree-dwellers bring up their little ones in water?
Some of them come down and lay their eggs in the ponds, and even
sleep down in the mud in winter. Others lay their eggs in little puddles
of water in the hollows of the trees, and there the young ones live
their tadpole life; while in one curious tree-frog of Mexico, called the
Nototrema, the mother has a pouch in her back, and the father places
the eggs in it for the little tadpoles to live in a moist home till they leap
out as perfect frogs.
Nor is this the only case in which fathers and mothers take care of
63
their young. In one species of frogs living near Paris, the father
winds the long string of gluey eggs round his thighs, and buries
himself in the ground till the young tadpoles are ready to come out,
and then he leaps into the water. And in one of the tongueless toads,
64
the Surinam toad, the mother’s soft skin swells up, forming ridges
and hollows, and when her eggs are laid the father clasps them in his
feet, and, leaping on her back, puts an egg into each hollow. Then the
mother goes into the water, and remains there while each tadpole
completes its changes in its own hole, jumping out at last a finished
toad.
Yet, in spite of curious habits such as these, the frogs and their
companions on the whole lead a very monotonous life. They are, it is
true, more intelligent than fish, and have learned to know more of the
world, but in the long ages that have passed since their ancestors
roamed in the coal-forest marshes, other and higher animals have
taken possession of the land, and left room only for a few scattered
groups of amphibia. Still, however, they remain hovering between two
lives, and filling such spots as neither the fishes nor the land animals
can occupy; and when we hear them croaking in the quiet night, or
see them leaping on the marshy ground, they remind us that we have
still living in our day, a link between the fish whose world is a world of
waters, and the air-breathing animals which have become masters of
the land.
THE REPTILES IN THEIR PALMY DAYS.
 CHAPTER V.
THE COLD-BLOODED AIR-BREATHERS OF THE
GLOBE IN TIMES BOTH PAST AND PRESENT.
And now the transformation is complete, for when we pass on to the
next division of backboned animals, the “Reptiles,” we hear nothing
more of gills, nor air taken from the water, nor fins, nor fishes’ tails.
From this time onward all the animals we shall study live with their
heads in the air, even if their bodies may be in the water; they swim
with their legs or, as in the case of the snakes, with their wriggling
bodies, and they lay their eggs on the land where their young begin
life at once as air-breathers.
Yet they can often remain for a long time both under water and
under ground, for they are still cold-blooded animals, breathing very
slowly, and easily falling into a state of torpor when the air around
them is cold and chill. They are but the first step, as it were, to active
land-animals; yet they have played a great part in the world, and
when we know their history we shall be surprised to find how much
Life has been able to make of her cold-blooded children.
To learn how this has been, however, we must travel away from
home and our own surroundings. The tiny brown lizard which runs
over our heaths, while its legless relation, the slowworm, burrows in
the ground,—the few snakes which glide through the grass of our
meadows, and the stray turtles thrown at rare intervals on our shores,
—tell us very little about true reptile life. It is to Africa, India, South
America, and other warm countries, that we must go to find the
formidable crocodiles, huge tortoises, large monitor-lizards, and
dangerous boa-constrictors, cobras, and rattle-snakes. And even then,
strong and powerful as some of these creatures are, they do not tell
us half the history of the cold-blooded air-breathers. For the day of
reptile greatness, like that of the sharks and enamel-scaled fish, was
long long ago.
Now that we know how frogs pass from water-breathing to air-
breathing, and how axolotls, accustomed to live all their life in the
water, can lose their gills and become land-animals, we can form an
idea how in those ancient days, while still the huge-plated newts were
wandering in the marshes, some creatures which had lost their gills
would take to the land, and their young ones starting at once as air-
breathers, as the black salamanders do now (see p. 80), would in time
lose all traces of the double or amphibian life, and become true air-
breathing reptiles.
At any rate, there we find them appearing soon after the coal-
forest period passed away, at first few and far between, in company
with the large amphibians, but spreading more and more as the ages
passed on, till they in their turn became monarchs of the globe.
65
Already, when the coal-forests had but just passed away, a lizard, in
some points like the monitors that now wander on the banks of the
Nile, was living among his humbler neighbours; and from that time
onwards we find more and more reptiles, till just before the time when
our white chalk was being formed by the tiny slime-animals at the
bottom of the sea, we should have seen strange sights if we could
have been upon the globe. For the great eft was no longer
“... lord and master of earth.”
All over the world, and even in our own little England, which was
then part of a great continent, cold-blooded reptiles of all sizes, from
lizards a few inches long to monsters measuring fifty or sixty feet from
head to tail, swarmed upon the land, in the water, and in the air. There
were among them a few kinds something like our tortoises, lizards,
and crocodiles; but the greater number were forms which have quite
died out since birds and beasts have spread over the earth, and a
wonderful and powerful set they were.
Some were vegetable-feeders, which browsed upon the trees or
fed upon the water-weeds, as our elephants and giraffes, our
hippopotamuses and sea-cows do now. Others were ferocious animal-
eaters, and their large pointed teeth made havoc among their reptile
companions, as lions and tigers do among beasts. Some swam in the
water devouring the fish, while others, like birds or bats, soared in the
air.
In the open ocean were the sea-lizards, some called Fish-
66
Lizards, like huge porpoises thirty feet long, but really cold-blooded
reptiles, with paddles for legs, and long flattened tails for swimming.
Woe to the heavily-enamel-scaled fish when these monsters came
along, their pointed teeth hanging in their widely-gaping mouths as
they raised their huge heads, with large open eyes, out of the water!
Then among these were others with long swan-like necks and small
67
heads, which would strike at the fish below them in the water, while
68
other slender, long-bodied monsters, measuring more than seventy
feet from tip to tail, flapped along the sea-shore with their four large
paddles, or swam out to sea like veritable sea-serpents, devouring all
that came in their way. These were all water-reptiles, while there were
also many smaller land-lizards playing about upon the shore, and
among the trees and bushes. But the strangest of all were perhaps the
69
“Flying reptiles” of all sizes, from one as small as a sparrow to one
which measured twenty-five feet from tip to tip of its wings. These
reptiles did not fly like birds, for they had no feathers, but only a broad
membrane, stretching from the fifth finger of their front claw to their
body, and with this they must have flown much as bats do now, while
some of them were armed not only with claws, but also with hooked
beaks and sharp teeth, with which they could tear their prey.
And meanwhile upon the land were wandering huge creatures,
larger than any animal now living, which were true reptiles with teeth
in their mouths, yet they walked on their hind legs like birds, probably
only touching the ground with their short front feet from time to time,
as kangaroos do. They had strong feet with claws, the marks of which
they have left in the ground over which they wandered, supporting
themselves by their powerful tails as they went.
 70
Some of them were peaceful vegetarians, browsing on the tree-
ferns and palms, and rearing their huge bodies to tear the leaves from
the tall pine-trees. But others were fierce animal-feeders. Fancy a
71
monster thirty feet high, with a head four or five feet long, and a
mouth armed with sabre-like teeth, standing upon its hind legs and
attacking other creatures smaller than itself, or preying upon those
other huge reptiles which were feeding peacefully among the trees.
Surely a battle between a lion and an elephant now would count as
nothing compared to the reptile-fights which must have taken place on
those vast American lands of the west, or on the European pasture-
grounds, where now the remains of these monsters are found.
But where are they all gone? We know that they have lived, for we
can put together the huge joints of their backbones, restore their
gigantic limbs, and measure their formidable teeth, but they
themselves have vanished like a dream. As time went on, other and
more modern forms, the ancestors of our tortoises, lizards, crocodiles,
and afterwards snakes, began to take the place of these gigantic
types; while warm-blooded animals, birds and beasts, began to
increase upon the earth. Whether it was that food became scarce for
these enormous reptiles, or whether the birds and beasts drove them
from their haunts, we are not yet able to find out. At any rate they
disappeared, as the ancient enamelled fishes and large newts had
disappeared before them, and soon after the beds of white chalk were
formed, which now border the south of England and north of France,
only the four divisions of tortoises, lizards, crocodiles, and snakes,
survived as remnants of the great army of reptiles which once covered
the earth.

* * * * *
Ah! if we could only have a whole book upon reptiles to show how
strangely different these four remaining groups have become during
the long ages that they have been using different means of defence;
and how, even in a single group, they employ so many varied
stratagems to survive in the battle of life! Look at the tortoises with
their hard impregnable shells, the crocodiles with their sharp-pointed
teeth and tough armour-plated skins, and the silently-gliding snakes
with their poisonous fangs or powerful crushing coils. See how the
tiny-scaled lizard darts out upon an insect and is gone in the twinkling
of an eye, and then watch the solemn chamæleon trusting to his
dusky colour for protection, and scarcely putting one foot before
another in the space of a minute.
Each of these has his own special device for escaping the dangers
of life and attacking other animals, and yet we shall find, before we
finish this chapter, that they are all formed on one plan, and that it is
in adapting themselves to their different positions in life that they have
become so unlike each other.
We shall all allow that the Tortoises are the most singular of any,
and it is curious that they are also in many ways the nearest to the
frogs and newts, although they are true reptiles. Slow ponderous
creatures, with hard bony heads (Fig. 20), wide-open expressionless
eyes, horny beaks, and thick clumsy legs, the tortoises seem at first
sight to be only half alive, as they lumber along,

“Moving their feet in a deliberate measure

Over the turf,”

carrying their heavy shell, and eating, when they do eat, in a dull
listless kind of way. They do, in truth, live very feebly, for they can only
fill their lungs with air by taking it in at the nostrils and swallowing it
as frogs do, and then letting it drift out again as the lungs collapse, for
their hard shell prevents them from pumping it in and out by the
movement of their ribs like other reptiles. This slowness of breathing
and the fact that they have only three-chambered hearts like frogs
(see p. 76), so that the good and bad blood mix at every round,
causes them to be very inactive, and they digest their food very slowly,
and have been known to live months and even years without eating.
 Fig. 20.

The Greek Tortoise.

This sluggishness would, indeed, certainly be their ruin in a

bustling greedy world, if it were not for the strong box in which they
72 73
live. Take in your hand one of the small Greek or American
tortoises, so often sold as pets, and you will see how well he can draw
back out of harm’s way, while at the same time you will, I think, be
sorely puzzled to understand how he is made. His head, his four legs,
and his tail, with their thick scaly skin, are intelligible enough. But why
do all these grow on to the inside of his shell, so that when you trace
them up you cannot find the rest of his soft body? You would hardly
guess that his shell is the rest of his body, or at least of his skeleton.
But it is so. The arched dome which covers his back is made of his
backbone and ribs, and the shelly plates arranged over it are his skin
hardened into horny shields, which, in the Hawksbill turtle, form the
tortoise-shell which is peeled off for our use; while the flat shell under
his body is the hardened skin of his belly, and the bones which belong
to it.
 Fig. 21.

Carapace of the Tortoise.

j, Joints of the backbone grown together; r, ribs formed into

a solid cover; sh, shoulder bones; h, hip bones covered by
carapace, which has grown over them.

Let us make this clear, for it is a strange history. If you look at the
skeleton of a lizard (Fig. 23, p. 103), it is all straight-forward enough.
His head fits on to his long-jointed backbone, which is able to bend in
all parts freely, down to the very tip of his tail. His front legs with their
shoulder bones (s), and his hind legs with their hip bones (h), are
attached in their proper places to his backbone, and lastly, his ribs (r)
protect the inside of his body, and by expanding and contracting pump
the air in and out of his lungs, the front ribs being joined underneath
in a breastbone. It is easy to see, therefore, that the lizard may be
active and nimble, twisting his body hither and thither, and escaping
his enemies by his quickness. But the tortoise is slow and sluggish,
and has only managed to baffle the numberless animals which are
looking out for a meal by fabricating a strong box to live in. But he had
to make this out of the same kind of skeleton as the lizard, with the
one difference that he has no breastbone. Let us see how it has been
brought about. The bones of his neck are jointed and free enough as
you can see (Fig. 21), and so are the joints of his tail, beginning from
behind his hip bones (h). But with his back it is different. The
backbone can be clearly seen inside the empty shell, running from
head to tail so as to cover the nerve-telegraph, but the joints (j) have
all grown together, and on the top they have become flattened into
74
hard plates, while the ribs (r) which are joined to them have also
been flattened out and have grown firmly together so as to make an
arched cover or carapace. If now you look at the back of the young
tortoise (Fig. 22), which has been taken out of the egg before it was
full-grown, you will see these plates (p) on the side where the tortoise-
shell (ts) has been peeled off. They have not yet widened out enough
to be joined together, and the ribs (r) are as yet only united by strong
gristle. But what is that row of oblong plates (mp) round the edge?
Those are the marginal plates, and they are mere skin bones, like the
bony plates of the crocodile, but they are all firmly fixed together so as
to bind the edges of the ribs, while plates of the same kind form the
shell under the body, and the whole is covered by the horny skin.
 Fig. 22.

Back of a Young Tortoise.—(From Rathke.)

ts, Tortoise-shell covering the whole carapace; this has been

removed on the right side; mp, marginal plates binding the
edges of the ribs; np, neck-plate; p, plates formed of the top of
the backbone joints which have grown together; r, ribs which
have not yet spread out so as to form a continuous shell; lm,
lm′, front and hind leg muscles not yet covered by the
carapace.

But there still remains another great puzzle. How come the
shoulder bones and hip bones of the tortoise to be inside his ribs
instead of being outside them, as in other animals? But look again at
our baby tortoise, and you will see that the muscles of his front legs
(lm, Fig. 22) are not covered by ribs, neither are those of his hind legs
(lm′). They stand just like those of other animals, in front between the
ribs and the neck, and behind between the ribs and the tail. But as the
tortoise grows up, the bony plates press forwards and backwards, and
cover up the shoulders and hips, protecting the soft legs and neck,
and giving him the curious appearance of living inside his own
backbone and ribs.
In this way, then, the tortoises have managed to hold their own in
the world. Living slowly, so that they sometimes go on growing up to
eighty years old, wanting but little food, and escaping the cold by
sleeping the winter months away in some sheltered nook, they ask but
little from Life, while they escape the dangers of sluggishness by
growing their skeletons so as to form a citadel which even birds and
beasts of prey can rarely break through. They are, it is true, often
eaten when young, and the jaguar of Brazil knows how to dig the poor
American tortoise out of his shell and eat him; while large birds are
formidable enemies to our Greek tortoise, and are said to drop it down
on the rocks, and break it to pieces. But, on the whole, they escape
most of these dangers, and wander in the woods and dry sandy places
of sunny Greece and Palestine, laying their bullet-shaped eggs in warm
spots to hatch, seldom wandering far from home, and lying down for
their winter’s sleep under heaps of drifted leaves or in holes of the
ground.
75
These are true Land-tortoises, and so are the gigantic tortoises
which used to live in the island of Aldabra, and others still surviving in
the Galapagos and other islands near Madagascar, which weigh at
least 200 pounds, and on whose backs Mr. Darwin rode when he found
them travelling up the island to get water to drink, feeding on the juicy
cactus as they went. Some carapaces in our museums belonging to
these tortoises measure four feet long and three broad; yet they were
timid fellows when alive, drawing back completely within their shells
76
when danger was near. We even find some smaller land-tortoises in
America, called the Box-tortoises, which have soft joints in their under
shell, so that they can draw it up both in front and behind, shutting
themselves completely in.
77
Not so the River-tortoises, which are greedy animal-feeders, and
as they live in the water do not need the same protection. Their box is
much flatter and more open at the ends, so as to allow them to swim
freely with their webbed feet; and they are fierce and bold, the
 78
Snapping Turtle of the lakes and rivers of America being a terrible
fellow, tearing the frogs and fishes in the water with his sharp claws,
and even snapping strong sticks in half with his powerful beak. The
Mud-tortoises, too, which swim swiftly with their strong legs and long
neck outstretched, do not need a hard shell, and they have scarcely
any plate below, and only a gristly leathery covering above, which
looks very like the mud in which they hide.
Lastly the Sea-tortoises or Turtles, which swim in the warm parts
of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, have only an open flat shell under
which they cannot draw their head and feet, for they strike out boldly
into the open ocean, feeding on seaweed, jelly-fish, and cuttle-fish,
rowing grandly along with their broad paddles which they feather like
oars as they go. They have only one time of weakness—when they
come on islands, such as Ascension and the Bahama Islands, which
they choose probably because they find fewer large animals there.
There the mother turtle arrives at night, looking fearfully around, and
if all is still comes flapping in over the sand, and, clearing a hole with
her flippers, lays about 200 soft round eggs and covers them up and
leaves them. Then in about a month the young turtles come out and
make at once for sea, though many of them fall victims to large birds
of prey on their way. Woe, too, to the mother when she is laying her
eggs, if these large birds are near, for she cannot defend her soft
body; or, worse still, if the natives are on the look-out; for then the
79
Green Turtle, coming ashore from the Atlantic, is tilted over on her
80
back and killed for food; and the Hawk’s-bill Turtle from the Indian
or Pacific Oceans is cruelly stripped of its shell for ornaments. Yet they
must run these risks, for their eggs would not hatch without the warm
sun, and we see how great is the gap between the last water-
breathers and the first air-breathers, when we remember that the
frogs go back to lay their eggs in the water, while the tortoises, even
when they live far out at sea, are forced to come in to shore, in spite
of great dangers, to lay their eggs that their little ones may begin life
upon land.

* * * * *
 Fig. 23.

Skeleton of a Lizard.

sp, Spinous processes, which in the tortoise are flattened

into plates; r, ribs; s, shoulder bone; a, upper arm; e, elbow;
fa, forearm; h, hip bone; th, thigh bone; k, knee; l, bones of
the leg; q, quadrate bone between upper and lower jaw.

And now, if we leave the tortoises and turn to the Lizards, we find
them meeting life’s difficulties in quite a different way. Here are no
sluggish movements, horny beaks, and strong boxes; but bright-eyed
creatures covered with shining scales, their mouths filled with sharp
teeth, with which even the small lizards can bite fiercely, and having
nimble lissome bodies, which wriggle through the grass or up the trees
in the twinkling of an eye. Yet the lizards, as we have seen, are formed
on the same plan as the tortoise, and their scales are thickenings in
their outer skin, just as his tortoise-shell is, and not true scales like
those of fish. They have learned to hold their own by sharpness and
quickness, and are probably the most intelligent of all the cold-blooded
animals, though even they are only lively in a jerky way under the
influence of warmth. They can breathe more easily than the tortoise,
for their ribs rise and fall, drawing in and driving out the air they need;
but they are still cold-blooded, for their heart has only three chambers.
It is when the bright sun is shining that they love to dart about,
chasing the insects upon which they feed; and the joints of their
backbone move so easily upon each other that they can twist and turn
in all imaginable ways, keeping their heads twisted in a most comical
manner when on the watch for flies. Nay, the very vertebræ
themselves are so loosely made that they can split in half, and if you
seize a lizard by the tail he will most likely leave it in your hand and
grow another.
They can live both in dry sandy places, where larger animals
cannot find food and water, and in thick underwood, and marshy
unhealthy places, where more quickly-breathing animals would be
poisoned by the fetid air; and we find them swarming in hot countries
in spite of enemies, their scales protecting them from the rough
surface of the rocks and trees on which they glide, their feeble legs
scarcely ever lifting their body from the object on which they glide
rather than walk.
 Fig. 24.

Gecko and Chamæleon.

81
The true land-creepers, like our little Scaly Lizard, lurk in dry
woody places, and on heaths and banks, darting out on the unwary
insects. Many of them lay their eggs in the warm sand or earth, but
the Scaly lizard carries them till they are ready to break, so that the
young ones come out lively and active as the eggs are laid. Others
have taken to the water, and among these are the Monitors of Africa
and Australia, which feed on frogs and fish and crocodiles’ eggs, and
are so strong and fierce that they often drag larger animals under the
water. Some are tree and wall climbers, such as the “Geckos,” with
thick tongues and dull mottled skins, and they have sharp claws and
suckers under their toes, so that they can hang or walk upside down,
on ceilings or overhanging rocks, or on the smooth trunks of trees;
and they love to chase the insects in the hot sultry nights, tracking
them to their secret haunts. They are far more active than the large
gentle Iguanas or Tree-Lizards of South America, from a few inches to
five feet long, which may be seen among the branches of the trees of
Mexico, their beautiful scales glistening in the sun as they feed on the
flowers and fruit. They swarm on all sides in those rich forest regions,
scampering over the ground, and then clinging with their claws to the
tree-bark as they gradually mount up into the dense foliage; and they
have many advantages, for not only can they climb to great heights
out of the reach of beasts of prey, but they can also swim well, having
been known to fling themselves from the overhanging branches into
the water below when danger was near. They do not, moreover,
descend as gracefully as the “Flying Lizards” of the East Indies, which
have a fold of skin stretched from the lengthened ends of their hinder
ribs, so that they sail from branch to branch as they chase the
butterflies and other insects.
But the most curious of all tree-lizards is the Chamæleon, with his
soft warty skin, his round skin-encircled eyes, his bird-like feet, and his
clinging tail. He never hurries himself, but putting forward a leg, at the
end of which is a foot whose claws are divided into two bundles, he
very deliberately grasps the branch, as a parrot does, loosens his tail,
draws himself forward, and then fastens on again with tail and claws;
while his eyes, each peering out of a thick covering skin, roll round
quite independently of each other, one looking steadily to the right,
while the other may be making a journey to the left. What is he
looking for? Just ahead of him on a twig sits a fly, but he cannot reach
him yet. So once more a leg comes out, and his body is drawn
gradually forwards. Snap! In a moment his mouth has opened, his
tube-like tongue, with clubbed and sticky tip, has darted out and
struck the fly, and carried it down his throat, while the chamæleon
looks as if he had never moved. It is not difficult to imagine that such
a slow-moving animal, whose natural colour is a brownish green like
the leaves among which he moves, would often escape unseen from
his enemies. And when light falls upon him, his tint changes by the
movement of the colour-cells in his skin, which seem to vary according
to the colour of the objects around, whenever he is awake and can see
them.
So by the waterside, on the land, and among the trees, the lizard
tribe still flourish in spite of higher animals; and just as we found some
legless kinds among the amphibia burrowing in the ground, so here,
too, we find legless lizards, some with small scaly spikes in the place
82
of hind legs, others, like the glass-snake of America and our English
83
slowworm (or blindworm), which have no trace of feet outside the
skin, but glide along under grass and leaves, eating slugs and other
small creatures, though they are true lizards with shoulder bones and
breastbones under the skin.

* * * * *
Here, then, we seem to be drifting along the road to snake-life,
but we must halt and travel first in another direction, upwards to a
higher group of animals, which may almost be called gigantic flesh-
eating lizards, though they are far more formidable and highly-
organised creatures. These are the Crocodiles, and no one looking at
them can doubt for a moment that they at least are well armed, so as
to have an easy time of it without much exertion. Huge creatures,
often more than twenty feet long, with enormous heads and wide-
opening mouths, holding more than thirty teeth in each jaw, they look
formidable indeed as they drag their heavy bodies along the muddy
banks of the Nile, their legs not being strong enough to lift them from
the ground. Their whole body is covered with strong horny shields,
and under these shields, on the back, are thick bony plates, which will
turn even a bullet aside, and quite protect the crocodile from the fangs
of wild beasts. Their eyelids are thick and strong, and they have a
third skin which they can draw over the eye sideways like birds; their
ears, too, have flaps to cover them, and their teeth are stronger and
more perfect than any we have yet seen, for they are set in sockets,
and new ones grow up inside the lower part of the old ones as they
are broken or worn away.

Fig. 25.

The Nile Crocodile.—(Tristram.)

But it is in the water that we see them in their full strength; there
they swim with their webbed feet and strokes of their powerful tail,
and feed upon the fishes and water animals—monarchs of all they
survey. Nor is the crocodile content with mere fish-diet. Often he will
lie with his nostrils just above the water and wait till some animal—it
may be a goat, or a hog, or even a good-sized calf—comes to drink,
then he will come up slowly towards it, seize it in his formidable jaws,
or sometimes strike it with his powerful tail, and drag it under water to
drown. For he himself can shut down his eyelids and the flaps over his
ears, and he has a valve in the back of his throat which he can close,
and prevent the water rushing down his open mouth; and after a while
he rises slowly till his nostrils are just above the water, and he can
breathe freely while his victim is drowning, because his nose-holes are
very far back behind the valve. Then when it is dead he brings it to
shore to tear it to pieces and eat it.
Thus the crocodiles of the Nile and the Ganges, the Gavials with
their long narrow snouts, and the Alligators of America, with their
shorter and broader heads, feed on fish and beasts, and all dead and
putrid matter, acting as scavengers of the rivers; while they
themselves are almost free from attack, except when tigers fall upon
them on land. But it is the young crocodiles which run the most risks
when they come out of the small chalky eggs which have been
hatched in the warm sand of the shore. True, their mother often
watches over them at this time, and even feeds them from her own
mouth; but in spite of her care many of them are eaten in their youth
by the tortoises and fishes which they would themselves have
devoured by-and-by, if they had lived to grow up; while the monitors,
ichneumons, waterfowl, and even monkeys, devour large numbers of
crocodiles’ eggs.

* * * * *
And now, if we were to turn our backs upon the great rivers in
which these animals dwell, and wander into the Indian jungle or the
South American forest, we might meet with enemies far more
dangerous and deadly, although they stand much lower in the reptile
world. Who would think that the huge boa of South America, and the
python and poisonous cobra of India, or even our own little viper,
whose bite is often death to its victim, are creatures of lower structure
than the harmless little lizard or the stupid alligator? Yet so it is. For
Snakes have no breastbone and have lost all vestiges of front legs and
shoulder bones, nor have they any hips or hind legs except among the
boas and rock-snakes; and even these have only small traces of hips,
which carry some crooked bones, ending in horny or fleshy claws, in
the place where hind legs ought to be. They have no eyelids (and by
this we may know them from the legless lizards), but their skin grows
right over the eyes, so that when a snake casts its skin there are no
holes where the eyes have been, but only clear round spaces like
watch-glasses, in the scaly skin. Their ears have no drum, and are
quite hidden under the scales with which their body is so thickly
covered that they must feel very little as they glide along. These
scales, like those of the lizard, are thickened parts of the outer skin,
and if you stretch a piece of snake-skin you can see them lying
embedded in it, the clear skin itself showing between.

Fig. 26.

Skeleton of a Snake.

sp, Spinous processes of the joints; r, ribs; q, quadrate

bones, joining upper and lower jaws; e, front of the lower jaw,
where there is an elastic band in the place of bone; b, ball end
of joint, facing the tail; c, cup end of joint, facing the head.

We must not, however, imagine that the snake is at a

disadvantage because he has lost so many parts which other reptiles
possess. On the contrary, he has most probably lost them because he
can do better without them. The transparent tough skin over his eye is
a far better protection in narrow rugged places, and among brakes and
brambles, than a soft movable eyelid; and if he does not see as well as
the crocodile, he has a most delicate organ of touch in his long,
narrow, forked tongue, with which he is constantly feeling as he goes,
touching now on one side, now on the other, each object he comes
near, and drawing the tongue in at every moment to moisten it in a
sheath at the back of his throat. A breast bone, moreover, would have
been a decided hindrance to him, for he wants the free use of all his
ribs; and as to the loss of his legs—in the place of four he has often
more than two hundred. For all along his backbone, except just at the
head and tail, a pair of ribs grow from each vertebra, being joined to it
by a cup-and-ball joint (c and b, Fig. 26), and the muscles between
them are so elastic that the ribs can be drawn out so that the body
seems to swell, and then drawn back towards the tail. In doing this
they strike the ground and the snake moves forwards, just as a
centipede does on its hundred legs.
It is worth while to take our harmless Ringed Snake in your hand
to feel this curious movement to and fro of the ribs, and to notice how
the creature forces itself through your grasp. Moreover, you will learn
at the same time one use of the broad single plates under the snake’s
body (see Fig. 27), for they, like all the scales, are loose from the skin
on the side towards the tail; and as they are fastened by muscles to
the ends of the ribs, you will find that at each movement they stand
up a little like tiles on a roof, and their edges coming against your
hand help to drive the snake forward.
Another thing you will learn if the snake does not know you, and
that is how strangely they hiss, often with their mouth closed, while
their whole body seems to quiver. This is very puzzling at first, till you
learn that one of their lungs has shrunk up, and the other is a very
long and narrow bag stretching nearly the whole length of the snake’s
stomach, and the hissing sound is made by drawing in and forcing out
the air from this long bag.
 Fig. 27.

Common Ringed Snake.84

Where the body is coiled the single under plates are seen.

Meanwhile, another way in which the snake will escape from your
hold unless you grasp it tightly, is by wriggling in all directions, so that
you do not know where to expect it next; for the whole of the joints of
its backbone are joined by a succession of cups-and-balls, the ball of
one joint fitting into the cup in the one behind it. It is easy to see how
such joints can move almost every way, since the ball can twist freely
in the cup wherever the muscles pull it (except where checked by the
spines on the top of the backbone), and can even turn so much to one
side that the snake can coil itself round or tie itself into a knot.
A creature that can glide along so smoothly, twist about so freely
round trees, through narrow openings and tangled brushwood, and
even swim in the water, has no small advantage in life; and the snake
can also coil itself up under a heap of dead leaves or in a hollow trunk
of a tree for safety, or to watch for its prey when no animal would
suspect it was near. But even the harmless snakes have something
besides this, namely, the power of swallowing animals much broader
and thicker than themselves. You will see on looking at the lizard’s
skull (p. 103) that its bottom jaw is not joined at once to the top one,
but there is a bone (q) between, which enables it to open its mouth
wider than if the two jaws touched each other. Now this bone (q) in
the snake’s jaw is so loosely hung that it moves very easily, and the
lower jaw also stretches back far behind the upper one, so that when
the snake brings the jaw forward it can open its mouth enormously
wide. Nor is this all; it can actually stretch the bones of its jaws apart,
for they have not their pieces all firmly fixed together. In the front of
the mouth each jaw has elastic gristle in the place of bone, and the
two halves of the jaw can thus be forced apart from each other,
making room for a very large mouthful indeed.
 Fig. 28.

The Boa Constrictor in the Forests of South America.

Now the snake’s teeth are all curved towards the back of his
mouth, and they are never used for chewing or tearing, but only for
holding and packing down its food. So when he seizes a creature too
large to be easily swallowed, he fastens his front teeth into it and then
brings forward one side of his jaws. He then fixes the teeth of this side
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