Index of Authors[157]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
E. B. Tylor[Frontispiece]
Bushmen Raiding Kafir Cattle[9]
Race Portraiture of the Ancient Egyptians[10]
J. F. Blumenbach[24]
Upper and Side Views of Skulls[29]
Paul Broca[36]
Skull of the Fossil Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints[74]
P. W. A. Bastian[83]
J. C. Prichard[105]

INTRODUCTION

In his address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association in 1892 Professor Alexander Macalister made use of a little allegory to illustrate the growth and progress of Anthropology.

“On an irregular and unfenced patch of waste land,” he said, “situated on the outskirts of a small town in which I spent part of my boyhood, there stood a notice-board bearing the inscription, ‘A Free Coup,’ which, when translated into the language of the Southron, conveyed the intimation, ‘Rubbish may be shot here.’ This place, with its ragged mounds of unconsidered trifles, the refuse of the surrounding households, was the favourite playground of the children of the neighbourhood, who found a treasury of toys in the broken tiles and oyster-shells, the crockery and cabbage-stalks, which were liberally scattered round.... Passing by this place ten years later, I found that its aspect had changed; terraces of small houses had sprung up, mushroom-like, on the unsavoury foundation of heterogeneous refuse. Still more recently I notice that these in their turn have been swept away; and now a large factory, wherein some of the most ingenious productions of human skill are constructed, occupies the site of the original waste.”

Here we may recognise the three stages in the progress of the science of Anthropology.