If space permitted I should have liked to make extensive quotations from Park Harrison’s most conclusive independent demonstration of the spread of culture along the same great route, at which he arrived from the study of the geographical distribution of the peculiar custom of artificially distending the lobe of the ear (=29=). This practice was not infrequent in Egypt (=79=) in the times of the new Empire, a fact which Harrison seems to have overlooked: but he records it amongst the Greeks, Hebrews, Etruscans, Persians, in Bœotia, Zanzibar, Natal, Southern India, Ceylon, Assam, Aracan, Burma, Laos, Nicobar Islands, Nias, Borneo, China, Solomon Islands, Admiralty Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Pelew Islands, Navigators Island, Fiji, Friendly Islands, Penrhyn, Society Islands, Easter Island, Peru, Palenque, Mexico, Brazil and Paraguay. This is an excellent and remarkably complete [if he had used the data now available it might have been made even more complete] mapping out of the great “heliolithic” track.
The identity of geographical distribution is no mere fortuitous coincidence.
It is of peculiar interest that Harrison is able to demonstrate a linked association between this custom and sun-worship in most of the localities enumerated. In the figures illustrating his memoir other obvious associations can be detected intimately binding it by manifold threads into the very texture of the “heliolithic culture.” If to this we add the fact that in many localities the design tattooed on the skin was the sun, we further strengthen the woof of the closely woven fabric that is gradually taking shape.
To these forty-year-old demonstrations let me add Wilson’s interesting recent monograph on the swastika (=105=), which independently tells the same story and blazens the same great track around the world (see his map). He further calls attention to the close geographical association between the distribution of the swastika and the spindle-whorl. By attributing the introduction of weaving and the swastika into most localities where they occur by the same culture-heroes he thereby adds the swastika to the “heliolithic” outfit, for weaving already belongs to it.
To these practices one might add a large series of others of a character no less remarkable, such, for example, as circumcision, the practice of massage (=57=, =67= and =11=), the curious custom known as _couvade_, all of which are distributed along the great “heliolithic” pathway and belong to the great culture-complex which travelled by it.