[83]. This statement is criticised by E. E. Sikes in Folk-Lore, xx., 1909, p. 424.
The chief value of the Greeks to the ethnologist is that they were collectors of material. Some of their theories have been substantiated, but they arrived at conclusions by deduction rather than by induction.
Thus in many ways anthropology owes a deep debt of gratitude to the classics. It was not until recently that this debt began to be repaid.
Within the last twenty or thirty years there has been an increasing recognition of the value of anthropological studies in the elucidation of the classics; and this healthy movement is mainly associated with the name of Professor William Ridgeway, of Cambridge, who devoted his presidential address before the Royal Anthropological Institute, in 1909, to this subject.
In 1887 Professor Ridgeway proceeded to apply the comparative method to Greek coins and weights in a paper called the “Homeric Talent: Its Origin and Affinities.”[[84]] He there tried to show that the origin of coined money among the Lydians, and its evolution by the Greeks and Italians, entirely accorded with the evolution of primitive money from the use of objects such as axes, ornaments, cattle, and so forth.
[84]. Hellenic Journal, VIII., p. 133; see also The Origin of Metallic Currency, 1892.
One of the relations of Ethnology to other branches of the Humanities which hitherto has received scant acknowledgment is its influence on the course of Political Science. Professor J. L. Myres recently gave a brilliant address on this subject at Winnipeg, in which he points out how Bodin (1530-1596), Edward Grimstone (1615), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Montesquieu (1689-1755), Rousseau (1712-1778), Voltaire (1694-1778), Herder (1744-1803), and others, referred to or utilised the accounts of natives by travellers to illustrate their theories of statecraft.
Chapter VIII.
THE HISTORY OF ARCHÆOLOGICAL DISCOVERY