Comparative Ethnology.
The main stumbling-block in the way of comparative ethnology was the difficulty of establishing the study on a firm scientific basis. “Man cannot be secluded from disturbing influences, and watched, like the materials of a chemical experiment in a laboratory.”[[99]] Ethnologists were accused of basing their conclusions on the most fragile evidence, collected from most untrustworthy sources:—
[99]. Lang, 1898, p. 39.
Anything you please ... you may find among your useful savages.... You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out what suits your case.... Your testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a science on such foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject? (l.c., p. 41).
To remove this reproach was the work of Professor Tylor.
Edward Burnett Tylor.
It is difficult to express in adequate terms what Professor E. B. Tylor has done for ethnology. He is the founder of the science of comparative ethnology; and his two great works, Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871), while replete with vast erudition, are so suggestive and graced by such a charming literary style and quiet humour that they have become “classics,” and have profoundly influenced modern thought. From their first appearance it was recognised that a master-mind was guiding the destinies of the nascent science. Some idea of the magnitude and diversity of his work may be gathered from the bibliography of 262 items, published between 1861 and 1907, collected by Miss Freire-Marreco, Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of his Seventy-first Birthday, Oct. 2, 1907. An appreciation of the labours of Professor Tylor is given by Andrew Lang in this volume. The true significance of the aims of “Mr. Tylor’s Science,” as Max Müller called it, may be best gathered from Professor Tylor’s own words:—
For years past it has become evident that the great need of anthropology is that its methods should be strengthened and systematised. The world has not been unjust to the growing science, far from it. Wherever anthropologists have been able to show definite evidence and inference, for instance, in the development series of arts in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, not only specialists, but the educated world generally, are ready to receive the results and assimilate them into public opinion. Strict method has, however, as yet, only been introduced over part of the anthropological field. There has yet to be overcome a certain not unkindly hesitancy on the part of men engaged in the precise operations of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, to admit that the problems of anthropology are amenable to scientific treatment. It is my aim to show that the development of institutions may be investigated on a basis of tabulation and classification.
This is the opening of a masterly paper “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent.”[[100]]
[100]. J. A. I., xviii., 245, 1889.