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In one connection and another it has already appeared that this stone and bronze-age culture of the Baltic peoples drew for its elements on other cultural regions and earlier phases of civilisation. These peoples borrowed persistently and with great facility. So far as this practice of borrowing is traceable in the stone age it is necessarily a borrowing of technological elements, since the nature of the materials in which they worked has allowed very little but industrial appliances to come down to the present; but as regards these technological elements the borrowing is of the most ubiquitous character. Even in the use of flint, as shown by the series of implements running through the period specifically characterised by the kitchen middens and down over the full-blown neolithic into the bronze age, - even in their use of flint they appear to have learned much of the serviceable innovations from outside, chiefly from the south. The early kitchen-midden implements are rather rudely chipped flints, and it is apparent that the grinding of flint was unknown on the Scandinavian waters in that time. Presently, when this improvement comes into vogue, it comes in along with the use of new and more serviceable forms, such as to suggest that they were worked out by help of examples drawn from the more advanced neolithic populations to the south. But along with a due recognition of this technological indebtedness it is also to be recognised that the Baltic peoples presently carried this polished (and chipped) flint technology to a perfection of workmanship and mechanical serviceability not surpassed, even if it may have been equalled, by any other neolithic culture.

Again, neither the crop plants nor the domestic animals are visibly present in the kitchen middens from the outset. As for the crop plants this may mean only a quite intelligible failure of evidence, and does not conclusively argue that, e.g., barley was not known and used from the beginning of the Baltic settlement, though the total absence of any trace is not to be set aside as having no significance. For the domestic animals, on the other hand, the negative evidence is conclusive, and it must be taken as an ascertained fact that these were introduced gradually at an appreciable interval after the beginnings of the Baltic culture had been made, and after the Baltic peoples had definitely acquired the (hybrid) racial complexion that marks them through later time. The paucity of the material, not in volume but in range, permits little more to be said in this connection for the stone age; except it be that the only other appreciable material evidence available, that of the graves and mounds, runs to much the same effect, - the use of these being also held to have been learned from outside, and developed in a characteristic manner on lines originally given by the same usage as it prevailed in other countries.

Throughout the bronze and iron periods of prehistory the same facile borrowing goes on; both the use and the material of the bronze and iron work being of foreign derivation. And as the sequence comes on down the ages and approaches historical dates, offering a progressively increasing volume and diversity of archaeological material, the evidence of borrowing extends also to other than the industrial arts. As the beginning of history, in the stricter sense, is approached this borrowing shows itself ever more notoriously in the aesthetic arts; in which, at the close of the pagan era, e.g., Scandinavian art shows its indebtedness to the Irish and other Gaelic culture at every turn. What is known of late Baltic (mainly Scandinavian) paganism carries the same insidious suggestion of facility for new ideas in the domain of supernatural beliefs; very much as the shifting progression of usages in sepulture in the remoter past argues that these peoples were not above learning from their neighbors, or perhaps rather were temperamentally defenseless against in-novation from the outside. In the late pagan era they seem, e.g., to have borrowed, and in some degree made over, several deities of foreign extraction; and it may be recalled that the pagan era closes with the wholesale acceptance of an alien mythology and religious scheme, the improvement and adaptation of which to their own temperamental needs has occupied much of the serious attention of these peoples ever since.

None of this extensive and unremitting draught on the technological and institutional resources of other cultural regions can be called an idle borrowing. The borrowed elements have invariably been assimilated, drawn into the cultural system and so combined and shaped to its purpose as to have led to an unbroken evolution of a scheme peculiar to these (hybrid) peoples and their needs, rather than to the substitution of a scheme from outside or a piecing-out of the scheme of things into which it is intruded. In other words, the borrowing has been done in a thoroughly workmanlike manner and with a free hand.

This proclivity to borrow, and the free and easy efficiency with which borrowed elements are turned to account, is a characteristic trait of north-European antiquity, as, indeed, it is still something of a distinctive mark of these peoples. It probably marks a temperamental bent of the north-European population, at the same time that it gives a certain characteristic flexibility to their scheme of institutions. As a temperamental trait it would appear to be traceable, at least in good part, to the fact of their hybrid extraction; possibly also in part to the peculiar race characteristics of the stocks from which this hybrid population is derived.⁷ The efficacy of borrowing that so comes to light in the life-history of the Baltic culture, as also in a less notorious manner in other instances of cultural intercourse, puts up to the student of institutions a perplexing question, or rather a group of perplexing questions. Something has just been said on the question of why one people borrows elements of culture or of technology with greater facility and effect than another. But the larger question stands untouched: Why do the borrowed elements lend themselves with greater facility and effect to their intrinsic use in the hands of the borrower people than in the hands of the people to whose initiative they are due? Why are borrowed elements of culture more efficiently employed than home-grown innovations? or more so than the same elements at the hands of their originators? It would of course be quite bootless to claim that such is always or necessarily the case, but it is likewise not to be denied that, as a matter of history, technological innovations and creations of an institutional nature have in many cases reached their fullest serviceability only at the hands of other communities and other peoples than those to whom these cultural elements owed their origin and initial success. That such should ever be the case is a sufficiently striking phenomenon, - one might even say a sufficiently striking discrepancy.

An explanation, good as far as it goes, though it may not go all the way, is to be looked for in the peculiar circumstances attending the growth, as well as the eventual transmission by borrowing, of any article of the institutional equipment. Technological elements affecting the state of the industrial arts, as being the more concrete and more tangible, will best serve to demonstrate the proposition. Any far-reaching innovation or invention, such as may eventually find a substantial place in the inventory of borrowed elements, will necessarily begin in a small way, finding its way into use and wont among the people where it takes its rise rather tentatively and by tolerance than with a sweeping acceptance and an adequate realisation of its uses and ulterior consequences.

Such will have been the case, e.g., with the domestication of the crop plants and the beginnings of tillage, or the domestication of the useful animals, or the use of the metals, or, again, with the rise of the handicraft system, or the industrial revolution that brought in the machine industry. The innovation finds its way into the system of use and wont at the cost of some derangement to the system, provokes to new usages, conventions, beliefs, and principles of conduct, in part directed advisedly to its utilisation or to the mitigation of its immediate consequences, or to the diversion of its usufruct to the benefit of given individuals or classes; but in part there also grow up new habits of thought due to the innovation which it brings into the routine of life, directly in the way of new requirements of manipulation, surveillance, attendance or seasonal time-schedule, and indirectly by affecting the economic relations between classes and localities, as well as the distribution and perhaps the aggregate supply of consumable wealth.

In the early times, such as would come immediately in question here, it is a virtual matter-of-course that any material innovation, or indeed any appreciable unit of technological ways and means, will be attended with a fringe of magical or superstitious conceits and observances. The evidences of this are to be found in good plenty in all cultures, ancient or contemporary, on the savage and barbarian levels; and indeed they are not altogether wanting in civilised life.

Many students of ethnology, folk-psychology and religion have busied themselves to good effect with collecting and analysing such material afforded by magical and superstitious practice, and in most instances they are able to trace these practices to some ground of putative utility, connecting them with the serviceable working of the arts of life at one point or another, or with the maintenance of conditions conducive to life and welfare in some essential respect. Where the ethnologist is unable to find such a line of logical connection between superstitious practice and the exigencies of life and welfare, he commonly considers that he has not been able to find what is in the premises, not that the premises do not contain anything of the kind he is bound to expect. But if magical and superstitious practices, or such of them as are at all of material consequence, are with virtual universality to be traced back through the channels of habituation to some putative ground of serviceability for human use, it follows that the rule should work, passably at least, the other way; that the state of the industrial arts which serve human use in such a culture will be shot through with magical and superstitious conceits and observances having an indispensable but wholly putative efficacy.

In many of the lower cultures, or perhaps rather in such of the lower cultures as are at all well known, the workday routine of getting a living is encumbered with a ubiquitous and pervasive scheme of such magical or superstitious conceits and observances, which are felt to constitute an indispensable part of the industrial processes in which they mingle. They embody the putatively efficacious immaterial constituent of all technological procedure; or, seen in detail, they are the spiritual half that completes and animates any process or device throughout its participation in the industrial routine. Like the technological elements with which they are associated, and concomitantly with them, these magically efficacious devices have grown into the prevalent habits of thought of the population and have become an integral part of the common-sense notion of how these technological elements are and are to be turned to account.⁸ And at a slightly farther shift in the current of sophistication, out of the same penchant for anthropomorphic interpretation and analogy, a wide range of religious observances, properly so called, will also presently come to bear on the industrial process and the routine of economic life; with a proliferous growth of ceremonial, of propitiation and avoidance, designed to further the propitious course of things to be done.

These matters of the magical and religious ritual of industry and economic arrangements among the peoples of the lower cultures are sufficiently familiar to all ethnological students, and probably they also are so far a matter of common notoriety that there is no need of insistence on their place and value in these lower cultures. They are spoken of here only to recall the fact that the large and consequential technological elements involved in any primitive system of industry have commonly carried such a fringe of putatively efficacious, though mechanically futile, waste motion. These naive forms of mandatory futility are believed to belong only on the lower levels of culture, although it should not be overlooked that magical and religious conceits still exercise something of an inhibitory influence in the affairs of industry even among the very enlightened peoples of Christendom.

But aside from these simple-minded institutional inhibitions on industrial efficiency that seem so much a matter of course in the lower cultures, there are others that run to much the same effect and hold their place among the more enlightened peoples in much the same matter-of-course way. These are in part rather obscure, not having been much attended to in popular speculation, and in part quite notorious, having long been subjects of homiletical iteration. And since this growth of what may be called secular, as contrasted with magical or religious, institutional inhibitions on efficiency, has much to do with latterday economic affairs, as well as with the material fortunes of our prehistoric forebears, a more detailed exposition of their place in economic life will be in place.

On the adoption of new industrial ways and means, whether in the way of specific devices and expedients or of comprehensive changes in methods and processes, there follows a growth of conventional usages governing the utilisation of the new ways and means. This applies equally whether the new expedients are homebred innovations or technological improvements borrowed from outside; and in any case such a growth of conventions takes time, being of the nature of adaptive habituation. A new expedient, in the way of material appliances or of improved processes, comes into the industrial system and is adapted to the requirements of the state of things into which it is introduced. Certain habitual ways of utilising the new device come to be accepted; as, would happen, e.g., on the introduction of domestic animals among a people previously living by tillage alone and having no acquaintance with the use of such animals under other conditions than those prevailing among purely pastoral peoples. So, again, the gradual improvement of boat-building and navigation, such as took place among the prehistoric Baltic peoples, would induce a progressive change in the conventional scheme of life and bring on a specialisation of occupations, with some division of economic and social classes. Or, again, in such a large systematic shift as is involved in the coming of the handicraft industry and its spread and maturing; class distinctions, occupational divisions, standardisation of methods and products, together with trade relations and settled markets and trade routes) came gradually into effect. In part these conventional features resulting from and answering to the new industrial factors continued to have the force of common-sense conventional arrangement only; in part they also acquired the added stability given by set agreement, authoritative control and statutory enactment.

So, in the case of the handicraft system such matters as trade routes, methods of package, transportation and consignment, credit relations, and the like, continued very largely, though not wholly nor throughout the vogue of the system, to be regulated by conventional vogue rather than by authoritative formulation; while on the other hand the demarkation between crafts and classes of craftsmen, as well as the standardisation of methods and output, were presently, in the common run, brought under rigorous surveillance by authorities vested with specific powers and acting under carefully formulated rules.

But whether this standardisation and conventionalisation takes the set form of authoritative agreement and enactment or is allowed to rest on the looser ground of settled use and wont, it is always of the nature of a precipitate of past habituation, and is designed to meet exigencies that have come into effect in past experience; it always embodies something of the principle of the dead hand; and along with all the salutary effects of stability and harmonious working that may be credited to such systematisation, it follows also that these standing conventions out of the past unavoidably act to retard, deflect or defeat adaptation to new exigencies that arise in the further course.

Conventions that are in some degree effete continue to cumber the ground.

All this apparatus of conventions and standard usage, whether it takes the simpler form of use and wont or the settled character of legally competent enactment and common-law rule, necessarily has something of this effect of retardation in any given state of the industrial arts, and so necessarily acts in some degree to lower the net efficiency of the industrial system which it pervades. But this work of retardation is also backed by the like character attaching to the material equipment by use of which the technological proficiency of the community takes effect. The equipment is also out of the past, and it too lies under the dead hand. In a general way, any minor innovation in processes or in the extension of available resources, or in the scale of organisation, is taken care of as far as may be by a patchwork improvement and amplification of the items of equipment already in hand; the fashion of plant and appliances already in use is adhered to, with concessions in new installations, but it is adhered to more decisively so in any endeavor to bring the equipment in hand up to scale and grade. Changes so made are in part of a concessive nature, in sufficiently large part, indeed, to tell materially on the aggregate; and the fact of such changes being habitually made in a concessive spirit so lessens the thrust in the direction of innovation that even the concessions do not carry as far as might be.⁹ It is in the relatively advanced stages of the industrial arts that this retardation due to use and wont, as distinguished from magical and religious waste and inhibitions on innovation, become of grave consequence. There appears, indeed, to be in some sort a systematic symmetry or balance to be observed in the way in which the one of these lines of technological inhibition comes into effectual bearing as fast as the other declines. At the same time, as fast as commercial considerations, considerations of investment, come to rule industry, the investor’s interest comes also to exercise an inhibitory surveillance over technological efficiency, both by the well-known channel of limiting the output and holding up the price to what the traffic will bear, - that is to say what it will bear in the pecuniary sense of yielding the largest net gain to the business men in interest, - and also by the less notorious reluctance of investors and business concerns to replace obsolete methods and plant with new and more efficient equipment.

Beyond these simple and immediate inhibitory convolutions within the industrial system itself, there lies a fertile domain of conventions and institutional arrangements induced as secondary consequences of the growth of industrial efficiency and contrived to keep its net serviceability in bounds, by diverting its energies to industrially unproductive uses and its output to unproductive consumption.¹⁰

With any considerable advance in the industrial arts business enterprise presently takes over the control of the industrial process; with the consequence that the net pe-cuniary gain to the business man in control becomes the test of industrial efficiency. This may result in a speeding up of the processes of industry, as is commonly noted by economists. But it also results in “unemployment” whenever a sustained working of the forces engaged does not, or is not believed to, conduce to the employer’s largest net gain, as may notoriously happen in production for a market. Also, it follows that industry is controlled and directed with a view to sales, and a wise expenditure of industrial efficiency, in the business sense, comes to mean such expenditure as contributes to sales; which may often mean that the larger share of costs, as the goods reach their users, is the industrially wasteful cost of advertising and other expedients of salesmanship.

The normal result of business control in industry - normal in the sense of being uniformly aimed at and also in that it commonly follows - is the accumulation of wealth and income in the hands of a class. Under the well-accepted principle of “conspicuous waste” wealth so accumulated is to be put in evidence in visible consumption and visible exemption from work. So that with due, but ordinarily not a large, lapse of time, an elaborate scheme of proprieties establishes itself, bearing on this matter of conspicuous consumption, so contrived as to “take up the slack.” This system of conspicuous waste is a scheme of proprieties, decencies, and standards of living, the economic motive of which is competitive spending. It works out in a compromise between the immediate spending of income on conspicuous consumption - together with the conspicuous avoidance of industrial work - on the one side, and deferred spending - commonly called “saving” - on the other side. The deferred spending may be deferred to a later day in the lifetime of the saver, or to a later generation; its effects are substantially the same in either case. There is the further reservation to be noted, that in so far as property rights, tenures and the conjunctures of business gain are in any degree insecure, measures will be taken to insure against the risks of loss and eventual inability to keep up appearances according to the accepted standard of living. This insurance takes the shape of accumulation, in one form or another, - provision for future revenue.

Like other conventions and institutional regulations, the scheme of spending rests on current, i.e., immediately past, experience, and as was noted above it is so contrived as to take up the calculable slack, - the margin between production and productive consumption. It is perhaps needless to enter the caution that such a scheme of conspicuous waste does not always, perhaps not in the common run of cases, go to the full limit of what the traffic will bear; but it is also to be noted that it will sometimes, and indeed not infrequently, exceed that limit. Perhaps in all cases, but particularly where the industrial efficiency of the community is notably high, so as to yield a very appreciable margin between productive output and necessary current consumption, some appreciable thought has to be spent on the question of ways and means of spending; and a technique of consumption grows up.

It will be appreciated how serious a question this may become, of the ways and means of reputable consumption, when it is called to mind that in the communities where the modern state of the industrial arts has adequately taken effect this margin of product disposable for wasteful consumption will always exceed fifty per cent of the current product, and will in the more fortunate cases probably exceed seventy-five per cent of the whole. So considerable a margin is not to be disposed of to good effect by haphazard impulse. The due absorption of it in competitive spending takes thought, skill and time for the organisation of ways and means. It is also not a simple problem of conspicuously consuming time and substance, without more ado; men’s sense of fitness and beauty requires that the spending should take place in an appropriate manner, such as will not offend good taste and not involve an odiously aimless ostentation. And it takes time and habituation, as well as a discriminate balancing of details, before a scheme of reputable standardised waste is perfected; of course, it also costs time and specialised effort to take due care of the running adjustment of such a scheme to current conditions of taste, ennui and consumptive distinction, - as seen, e.g., in the technique of fashions. It has, indeed, proved to be a matter of some difficulty, not to say of serious strain, in the industrially advanced communities, to keep the scheme of conspicuous waste abreast of the times; so that, besides the conspicuous consumers in their own right, there have grown up an appreciable number of special occupations devoted to the technical needs of reputable spending. The technology of wasteful consumption is large and elaborate and its achievements are among the monuments of human initiative and en-deavor; it has its victories and its heroes as well as the technology of production.

But any technological scheme is more or less of a balanced system, in which the interplay of parts has such a character of mutual support and dependence that any substantial addition or subtraction at any one point will involve more or less of derangement all along the line. Neither can an extremely large contingent of reputable waste be suddenly superinduced in the accepted standard of living of any given community - though this difficulty is not commonly a sinister one - nor can a large retrenchment in this domain of what is technically called “the moral standard of living” be suddenly effected without substantial hardship or without seriously disturbing the spiritual balance of the community. To realise the import of such disturbance in the scheme of wasteful consumption one need only try to picture the consternation that would, e.g., fall on the British community consequent on the abrupt discontinuance of the Court and its social and civil manifestations, or of horseracing, or of the established church, or of evening dress.

But since the growth and acceptance of any scheme of wasteful expenditure is after all subsequent to and consequent upon the surplus productivity of the industrial system on which it rests, the introduction, in whole or in part, of a new and more efficient state of the industrial arts does not carry with it from the outset a fully developed system of standardised consumption; particularly, it need not follow that the standard scheme of consumption will be carried over intact in case a new industrial technology is borrowed. There is no intimate or intrinsic mutuality of mechanical detail between the technology of industry and the technique of conspicuous waste; the high-heeled slipper and the high-wrought “picture hat,” e.g., are equally well accepted in prehistoric Crete and in twentieth-century France; and the Chinese lady bandages her foot into deformity where the Manchu lady, in evidence of the same degree of opulence in the same town, is careful to let her foot run loose. It is only that, human nature being what it is, a disposable margin of production will, under conditions of private ownership, provoke a competent scheme of wasteful consumption.

Owing to this mechanical discontinuity between any given state of the industrial arts and the scheme of magical, religious, conventional, or pecuniary use and wont with which it lives in some sort of symbiosis, the carrying-over of such a state of the industrial arts from one community to another need not involve the carrying-over of this its spiritual complement. Such is particularly the case where the borrowing takes place across a marked cultural frontier, in which case it follows necessarily that the alien scheme of conventions will not be taken over intact in taking over an alien technological system, whether in whole or in part. The borrowing community or cultural group is already furnished with its own system of conceits and observances - in magic, religion, propriety, and any other line of conventional necessity - and the introduction of a new scheme, or the intrusion of new and alien elements into the accredited scheme already in force, is a work of habituation that takes time and special provocation. All of which applies with added force to the introduction of isolated technological elements from an alien culture, still more particularly, of course, where the technological expedients borrowed are turned to other uses and utilised by other methods than those employed in the culture from which they were borrowed, - as, e.g., would be the case in the acqquisition of domestic cattle by a sedentary farming community from a community of nomadic or half-nomadic pastoral people, as appears to have happened in the prehistoric culture of the Baltic peoples. The interposition of a linguistic frontier between the borrower and creditor communities would still farther lessen the chance of immaterial elements of culture being carried over in the transmission of technological knowledge. The borrowed elements of industrial efficiency would be stripped of their fringe of conventional inhibitions and waste, and the borrowing community would be in a position to use them with a freer hand and with a better chance of utilising them to their full capacity, and also with a better chance of improving on their use, turning them to new uses, and carrying the principles (habits of thought) involved in the borrowed items out, with unhampered insight, into farther ramifications of technological proficiency. The borrowers are in a position of advantage, intellectually, in that the new expedient comes into their hands more nearly in the shape of a theoretical principle applicable under given physical conditions; rather than in the shape of a concrete expedient applicable within the limits of traditional use, personal, magical, conventional. It is, in other words, taken over in a measure without the defects of its qualities.

Here, again, is a secondary effect of borrowing, that may not seem of first-rate consequence but is none the less necessarily to be taken into account. The borrowed elements are drawn into a cultural scheme in which they are aliens and into the texture of which they can be wrought only at the cost of some, more or less serious, derangement of the accustomed scheme of life and the accepted system of knowledge and belief. Habituation to their use and insight into their working acts in its degree to incapacitate the borrowers for holding all their homebred conceits and beliefs intact and in full conviction. They are vehicles of cultural discrepancy, conduce to a bias of skepticism, and act, in their degree, to loosen the bonds of authenticity. Incidentally, the shift involved in such a move will have its distasteful side and carry its burden of disturbance and discomfort; but the new elements, it is presumed, will make their way, and the borrowing community will make its peace with them on such terms as may be had; that assumption being included in the premises.

In some instances of such communication of alien technological and other cultural elements the terms on which a settlement has been effected have been harsh enough, as, e.g., on the introduction of iron tools and fire-arms among the American Indians, or the similar introduction of distilled spirits, of the horse, and of trade - especially in furs - among the same general group of peoples. Polynesia, Australia, and other countries new to the European technology, and to the European conceits and conceptions in law, religion and morals, will be called to mind to the same effect. In these cases the intrusion of alien, but technologically indefeasible, elements of culture has been too large to allow the old order to change; so it has gone to pieces. This result may, of course, have been due in part to a tempera-mental incapacity of these peoples for the acquisition of new and alien habits of thought; they may not have been good borrowers, at least they appear not to have been sufficiently good borrowers. The same view, in substance, is often formulated to the effect that these are inferior or “backward” races, being apparently not endowed with the traits that conduce to a facile apprehension of the modern European technological system.

It appears to have been otherwise with the peoples of the Baltic culture, late and early. They have been good borrowers, having borrowed persistently, ubiquitously and well. The proof of their exceptional capacity as borrowers is the general run of the life-history of these populations and their culture. As a general proposition, they appear not to have suffered a disproportionate setback in population or in productive efficiency even at those epochs when the borrowing took on a wholesale character, as, e.g., on the transition to bronze, or later to iron, or later still in the sweeping shift from paganism to Christianity. In each of these instances, of course, something of a serious disturbance and impairment is traceable, at least in the two latter episodes; but even the shift to the Christian faith appears to have involved only a relatively transient decline, and in each case this cultural region comes out of the era of transition apparently stronger than before the intrusion of new cultural elements took place. As would be expected, the last named, the shift to Christianity, was the most demoralising of these adventures in cultural borrowing; since this was, in the main and immediately, a borrowing of immaterial, institutional elements, without any corresponding gain in technology; so that in this instance the shock to the cultural scheme came from factors which did not carry such an immediate and intrinsic compensation for the resulting derangement as did the technological change involved in the introduction of the metals. It is, of course, also possible to overstate both the magnitude and the abruptness of the change from the pagan to the Christian scheme in the Baltic region; indeed, it has not been unusual to do so. But when all is said the fact remains that through all their borrowing of expedients, information, institutions and ideals no collapse has overtaken this culture, such as either to reduce the population to virtual extinction - as has happened in analogous circumstances, e.g., in Tasmania, Australia, various parts of Polynesia and America, in a more or less sweeping fashion - or to substitute a substantially alien cultural scheme for what prevailed before the coming of the innovation in technology or in use and wont.

Not that there have been no serious, or even alarming, conjunctures in the cultural history of the Baltic peoples; it is only that they have come through without that degree of discontinuity that would involve a substitution of a new race (or racial mixture) or a new scheme of civilisation alien to what went before. There is at least one juncture in the bronze age when the derangement of the conditions of life in the Baltic country appears to have fallen into really precarious shape, - between the second and third periods of the bronze age in Montelius’s chronology, or between the “early” and the “late” bronze age as more commonly spoken of, - and there is suggestive evidence of something of a break at a later point in the sequence, before the com-ing of iron.¹¹ Something of grave import, in the way of a difficult interval, may also be surmised in the earlier half of the iron age. What may have been the nature of these episodes that so have an untoward look is at the best a matter of surmise, with little chance of reaching anything like a secure conclusion in the present state of the archaeological evidence. There may have been something like hostile contact with alien peoples outside, or internal dissensions, or an epidemic disease, such, e.g., as the black death, or the plague that visited Athens in the fifth century; or it may conceivably have been nothing more serious than an interruption of trade relations with the Mediterranean and Black Sea, due to extensive raiding or to the shifting of peoples in the intervening territory.

Through it all, however, the continuity of the cultural sequence is visible, as is also the efficiency of this culture, in the biological sense that the population does not seriously or enduringly fall off. The latter test is perhaps the more conclusive. So much so that the Baltic region is known to antiquity as a “cradle of nations” even before anything much else is known of it by the civilised peoples of antiquity and their writers. That it deserved that name and continued to make it good is seen in the inexhaustible barbarian migrations that continued to run outward from the Baltic center.

The presumptive characteristics of this culture, then, as one gets an impression from a study of its antiquities and by inference from the conditions of life which the country offers and from the make-up of its population, may tentatively be set down. It would be a small-scale culture, in the sense that the local units would be of no great magnitude; although it may be conceived to have covered a relatively extensive area in the aggregate and to have covered this area with a fairly dense population; it habitually stood in fairly close communication with other peoples outside, even over relatively long distances, principally by way of trade; these peoples borrowed freely, both in technological and in other institutional matters,¹² and made notably free and efficient use of all borrowed elements. The scheme of institutions, economic, civil, domestic and religious, that would fit these circumstances would be of a relatively slight fixity, flexible, loose-knit, and naive, in the sense that they would be kept in hand under discretionary control of neighborly common sense, - the continued borrowing and the facility with which borrowed elements are assimilated and turned to account goes far to enforce this conclusion.

Altogether its most impressive traits are a certain industrial efficiency, particularly efficiency in the mechanic arts, and ist conduciveness to the multiplication of its people; whereas its achievements in political organisation or in the domain of art and religion are relatively slight. It is a civilisation of workmanship and fecundity rather than of dynastic power, statecraft, priestcraft or artistic achievement.