[254] The Trend of Human Progress, American Anthropologist, new series, vol. 1, 1899, p. 401.
A notable correspondence between structure and function, of such sort as to reflect the habit and habitat, appears in the conspicuous manual development of the Seri. Enjoying a climate too mild to make houses necessary, finding animal food too plentiful to necessitate elaborate contrivances for the chase or milling or other devices for reducing vegetal food, provided by nature with material (in the form of carrizal) for an ideally suitable water craft, barred by geographic boundaries from neighboring tribes, and having neither material for nor interest in commerce, the denizens of Seriland were never forced into the way of mechanical development; yet their simple industries, involving as they do swift stroke and strong grasp and dexterous digitation, are mainly such as urge manual development more strenuously than would be normal among tribesmen connected with their environment through the medium of tools. The demand for manual strength and skill is intensified among the Seri by both natural and domestic conditions; the ever-ready (and almost the sole) material suitable for simple adjuncts to the hand abounds in the form of wave-worn cobbles; these cobbles are easily usable in such wise as to serve all ordinary purposes, and their abundance discourages the production of more highly differentiated tools; while their habitual use promotes manual strength and deftness, coupled with that digital freedom (required, for example, in grasping a ball) which most clearly distinguishes the human hand from the subhuman paw. Conjoined with these natural conditions are demotic demands tending to cultivate manual fitness and eliminate the manually unfit; for, in addition to the direct industrial premium on dexterity, through which the dexterous survive while the clumsy starve, there is a special premium growing out of the marriage custom, through which only the manually efficient (and at the same time morally acceptable) are put in the way of leaving lines of descendants.[255] Naturally, in view of the combination of factors, all traceable directly or indirectly to environmental conditions, the Seri afford a peculiarly striking example of cheirization extended to an entire tribe (if not to a genetic stock of people)—indeed the remarkably developed Seri hands and feet first suggested the importance of this process of human development and led to its formal characterization.