Chapter I.
THE PIONEERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Definition of the word “Anthropology.”
Aristotle, “the father of them that know,” as Dante called him, is credited with having coined the word “anthropologist”; but he did not employ it in a very complimentary sense. Describing a lofty-minded man in his Ethics, he terms him ουκ ανθρωπολογος—not a gossip, not a talker about himself. But the word does not seem to have supplied a permanent want in the Greek world, and we meet it next in a Latin form in the sixteenth century. Anthropologium was then used in a restricted sense, relating to man’s bodily structure; and the first work in which it occurs is generally stated to be Magnus Hundt’s Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, which appeared in 1501, and dealt in a general way with human anatomy and physiology.
The first appearance of the word in English was probably in the seventeenth century, when an anonymous book was published bearing the title Anthropologie Abstracted; or, The idea of Humane nature reflected in briefe Philosophicall and anatomical collections (1655). The author defines his subject thus:—
Anthropologie, or the history of human nature, is, in the vulgar (yet just) impression, distinguished into two volumes: the first entitled Psychologie, the nature of the rational soule discoursed; the other anatomie, or the fabrick or structure of the body of man revealed in dissection ... of the former we shall in a distracted rehersall, deliver our collections.[[2]]
[2]. See Bendyshe, p. 356.
The meaning of the word was scarcely clear in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when we find, in the British Encyclopædia of 1822, the following definitions, “A discourse upon human nature,” and “Among Divines, that manner of expression by which the inspired writers attribute human parts and passions to God.”
Concerning the present use of the term “Anthropology,” few will take exception to the definition given by Topinard in his l’Anthropologie (1876): “Anthropology is the branch of natural history which treats of man and the races of man.” It may be yet more succinctly described as “the science of man,” which comprises two main divisions—the one which deals with the natural man (ανθρωπος, or homo); the other which is concerned with man in relation to his fellows, or, in other words, with social man (εθνορ, or socius). At the end of the Introduction we give the classification which we propose to adopt. It should, however, be stated that, whereas in this country we employ the term “Anthropology” to cover the whole subject, it is common on the Continent to restrict the term to what we designate as “Physical Anthropology,” “Anthropography,” or “Somatology.”