different inflection? This problem, so far as it is related to
the lives of primitive peoples, has already been studied by the
ethnologists. Rivers, in his analysis of the cultures of Australian
people, has found that what we have hitherto regarded as primitive
cultures are really fusions of other and earlier forms of culture.[3]
The evidence of this is the fact that the fusion has not been
complete. In the process of interchange it frequently happens that
what Rivers calls the "fundamental structure" of a primitive society
has remained unchanged while the relatively formal and external
elements of alien culture only have been taken over and incorporated
with it.

There are indications also that, where cultural borrowings have taken
place, the borrowed elements have for the people who have taken them
over a meaning different from what they had for the people from whom
they were borrowed. W.J. McGee, in an article entitled "Piratical
Acculturation," has given an interesting illustration of this fact.[4]
McGee's observations of the Beri Indians go to show that they imitated
the weapons of their enemies, but that they regarded them as magical
instruments and the common people did not even know their names. There
are numerous other illustrations of this so-called "piratical
acculturation" among the observations of ethnologists. It is said that
the Negroes in Africa, when they first came into possession of the
white man's guns, regarded them as magical instruments for making a
noise and used them, as the Germans used the Zeppelins and the
newspapers, merely to destroy the enemy's morale.

No doubt the disposition of primitive peoples is to conceive
everything mystically, or animistically, to use the language of
ethnology, particularly where it concerns something strange. On the
other hand, when the primitive man has encountered among the cultural
objects to which civilization has introduced him, something which he
has been able to make immediately intelligible to himself, he has at
once formed a perfectly rational conception of it. Some years ago at
Lovedale, South Africa, the seat of one of the first successful
industrial mission schools, there was an important ceremony to which
all the native African chiefs in the vicinity were formally invited.
It was the introduction and demonstration of the use of the plow, the
first one that had ever been seen in those parts. The proceedings were
followed with great interest by a la