rge gathering of natives. When the
demonstration was finished one old chief turned to his followers and
said with great conviction: "This is a great thing which the white man
has brought us. One hoe like that is worth as much as ten wives." An
African chief could hardly have expressed appreciation of this one
fundamental device of our civilization in more pragmatic or less
mystical terms. The wise old chief grasped the meaning of the plow at
once, but this was because he had been pre-adapted by earlier
experience to do so.

It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and
temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult,
though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious
institutions to people of a different racial type and a different
social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in
Human Beings," in which he points out how completely we are likely to
miss the point and mistake the inner significance of the lives of
those about us, unless we share their expedience, emphasizes this
fact. If then the transmission and fusion of cultures is slow,
incomplete and sometimes impossible, it is because the external forms,
the formulas, technical devices of every social tradition can be more
easily transmitted than the aims, the attitudes, sentiments and ideals
which attach to them are embodied in them. The former can be copied
and used; the latter must be appreciated and understood.

For a study of the acculturation process, there are probably no
materials more complete and accessible than those offered by the
history of the American Negro. No other representatives of a primitive
race have had so prolonged and so intimate an association with
European civilization, and still preserved their racial identity.
Among no other people is it possible to find so many stages of culture
existing contemporaneously. It has been generally taken for granted
that the Negro brought a considerable fund of African tradition and
African superstition from Africa to America. One not infrequently
finds in the current literature and even in standard books upon the
Negro, references to voodoo practices among the Negroes in the
Southern States. As a matter-of-fact the last authentic account which
we have of anything approaching a Negro nature worship in the United
States took place in Louisiana in 1884. It is described by George W.
Cable in an article on "Creole Slave Songs" whic