Even this ambitious project does not exhaust the scope of this study. We want to see whether the intensive investigation of life-histories will in any way deepen our understanding of the whole social and political order. The life-story of a Hottentot or an American reveals the concrete reality of images and moods as they are experienced seriatim by those whose life is caught up in the web of violently contrasting cultures. The trained student of society discerns a wealth of culture patterns whose full meaning in human experience can only be revealed by securing the subjective history of those who are exposed to them. In some cultures the child is slapped, switched, and beaten; in some cultures the child is rarely the target of corporal punishment. Does this mean that the children in the first culture will harbor revenge and welcome violence in social life? In some cultures, parental control is negligible from the fourth to the fourteenth year, and in other cultures supervision is strict and continuous. What difference does this make in the developing view of the world in successive generations? Those who are within the same culture are exposed to many minor variations in social practice, and we may hope to ascertain the consequences of these differences for the minds of those who undergo them. This book is in harmony with a trend which has been growing in strength in the social sciences. Social science has been moving toward the intensive study of the individual’s account of himself. This is a movement which is poorly conveyed by the phrase, “an interest in human biography,” because the term “biography” is full of irrelevant literary and historical connotations. The person’s own story is not a chronology of everything he thought and did, nor is it an impressionistic interpretation of what he experienced. The life-history is a natural history, and a natural history is concerned with facts which are _developmentally_ significant. The natural history of the earth is not a rehearsal of every event included within the series, but a selective account of major changes within the series. Dated events matter, but they matter not because they have dates but because they mark phases. When biography is treated as natural history, the purpose is to pick and choose the principal epochs of development and to identify their distinctive patterns.