ABSTRACT
A complete account of culture achievements would include the fields of ethnology and history, and the task would be stupendous; for “the multiplicity of forms … which different societies offer to our view, is almost infInite.” 1 In the case of the primitive cultures alone the task would exceed the erudition of any ethnologist, since there are many thousand primitive cultures, and each is to some extent distinctive; there are, in addition, many historical civilizations. Human culture, therefore, is too multifarious to comprehend in detail, but it may be possible to select traits which to some extent are typical of the respective cultures.
