Our next chapter will return to rather formidable arguments for inventiveness in the American Indian; but first we should perhaps point out that Gladwin is not an Elliot Smith riding the hobby of diffusion to the end. He admits independent invention in many important fields. Pottery was invented, he believes, at least twice in the Old World. He concedes a number of origins for agriculture in the New. But he believes that the really inventive men of the New World—the men who developed corn, and devised the Maya calendar—were the men who brought brains as well as cultural equipment in the ships of Alexander, and put those brains to work devising more cultural equipment. (He ignores the fact that corn was developed more than a thousand years before Alexander was born.) Gladwin simply does not consider that early man and his successors before the birth of Christ were smart enough to produce much more than exceptionally good spear points and rather inferior milling stones. He does not believe that the Australoids or the Folsom men or the Algonquins or the Mongoloids who came over just before our era—let alone the Uto-Aztecans or the Athabascans a little later—were capable of inventing much in the way of neolithic civilization. He points out that the Indian—bereft, presumably, of the brains and blood of the men of Alexander’s fleet—has not done much inventing in the past four centuries. An opponent might remark that many an inventive, creative people has lapsed from grace—the Egyptians and the Greeks, for instance. The Polynesians and the Melanesians have not done much more inventing than the Indians since the days when the Alexandrians turned them into pre-Columbian pioneers of America culture. Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused