Recent attempts have been made to raise to a general principle this point of view which, with due caution, may be applied here and there. Herbert Spinden in his reconstruction of American prehistoric chronology, Alfred Kroeber in his analysis of cultural forms of the Pacific Coast, and quite recently Clark Wissler have built up, founded on this principle a system of historic sequences that appear to me as quite untenable. That widely distributed cultural traits develop special forms in each particular area is a truism that does not require any proof. That these local developments may be arranged in a chronological series, that those of the most limited distribution are the youngest, is only partially true. It is not difficult to find phenomena that center in a certain region and dwindle down at the outskirts, but it is not true that these invariably arise on an ancient substratum. The converse is often true, that an idea emanating from a center is diffused over a wide area. Neither may the origin always be looked for in the area of the strongest development. In the same way as we find animals surviving and flourishing in regions far distant from the locality in which they developed, so cultural traits may be transferred and find their highest expression in regions far away from their origin. The bronze castings of Benin; the wood carvings of New Zealand; the bronze work of ancient Scandinavia; the giant stone work of Easter Island; the early cultural development of Ireland and its influences over Europe are examples of this kind. Equally unsafe are the methods used by Fritz Graebner and Pater W. Schmidt who claim the stability of certain very old and, as I fear, fictitious correlations between cultural traits. It is probably not necessary to point out the utter inadequacy of Elliott Smith’s attempt to reduce all ethnological phenomena to a single, and anthropologically speaking, late source and to assume a permanence of cultural forms that exists nowhere.