objects, but to point out that there is
evidence that they can and do so pass with very little, if any,
admixture of peoples or of the deeper and more fundamental elements of
the culture. Much more important is language; and if you will think over
the actual conditions when one people either visit or settle among
another, this greater importance will be obvious. Let us imagine a party
of Melanesians visiting a Polynesian island, staying there for a few
weeks, and then returning home (and here I am not taking a fictitious
occurrence, but one which really happens). We can readily understand
that the visitors may take with them their betel-mixture, and thereby
introduce the custom of betel-chewing into a new home; we can readily
understand that they may introduce an ornament to be worn in the nose
and another to be worn on the chest; that tales which they tell will be
remembered, and dances they perform will be imitated. A few Milanesian
words may pass into the language of the Polynesian island, especially as
names for the objects or processes which the strangers have introduced;
but it is incredible that the strangers should thus in a short visit
produce any extensive change in the vocabulary, and still more that they
should modify the structure of the language. Such changes can never be
the result of mere contact or transient settlement but must always
indicate a far more deeply seated and fundamental process of blending of
peoples and cultures.

Few will perhaps hesitate to accept this position; but I expect my next
proposition to meet with more skepticism, and yet I believe it to be
widely, though not universally, true. This proposition is that the
social structure, the framework of society, is still more fundamentally
important and still less easily changed except as the result of the
intimate blending of peoples, and for that reason furnishes by far the
firmest foundation on which to base the process of analysis of culture.
I cannot hope to establish the truth of this proposition in the course
of a brief address, and I propose to draw your attention to one line of
evidence only.

At the present moment we have before our eyes an object-lesson in the
spread of our own people over the earth's surface, and we are thus able
to study how external influence affects different elements of culture.
What we find is that mere contact is able to transmit much in the way of
material culture. A passing vessel, which does not even