But suppose, for the sake of argument, we shut our ears to the voice of common sense, and allow ourselves to be hypnotised into the belief that some complex and highly specialised instinct (_i.e._ precisely the type of instinct which real psychologists—not the ethnological variety—deny to mankind) impelled groups of men scattered as far apart as Ireland, India and Peru independently the one of the other to build mausolea of the same type, to acquire similar beliefs regarding the petrifaction of human beings, and many other extraordinary things connected with such monuments, how is this “psychological explanation” going to help us to explain why the wives of the builders of these monuments, whether in Africa, Asia or America, should have their chins pricked and rubbed with charcoal, or why they should circumcise their boys, or why they should have a tradition of the deluge? Does any theory of evolution help in explaining these associations? They are clearly fortuitous associations of customs and beliefs, which have no inherent relationship one to the other. They became connected purely by chance in one definite locality, and the fact that such incongruous customs reappear in association in distant parts of the globe is proof of the most positive kind that the wanderings of peoples must have brought this peculiar combination of freakish practices from the centre where chance linked them together. Because it was the fashion among a particular group of megalith-builders to tattoo the chins of their womenkind, the wanderers who carried abroad the one custom also took the other: but there is no genetic or inherent connection between megalith-building and chin-tattooing. Such evidence is infinitely stronger and more convincing than that afforded by one custom considered by itself, because in the former case we are dealing with an association which is definitely and obviously due to pure chance, such as the so-called psychological method, however casuistical, is impotent to explain. But the study of such a custom as tattooing, even when considered alone, affords evidence that ought to convince most reasonable people of the impossibility of it having independently arisen in different, widely scattered, localities. The data have been carefully collected and discussed with clear insight and common sense by Miss Buckland (=10=) in an admirable memoir, which I should like to commend to all who still hold to the meaningless dogma “of the similarity of the working of the human mind” as an explanation of the identity of customs. Tattooing is practised throughout the great “heliolithic” track. [Striking as Miss Buckland’s map of distribution is as a demonstration of this, if completed in the light of our present information, it would be even more convincing, for she has omitted Libya, which so far as we know at present may possibly have been the centre of origin of the curious practice.]