First, a heap of heterogeneous facts and fancies, the leavings of the historian, of the adventurer, of the missionary—the favourite playground of dilettanti of various degrees of seriousness. Next we see order arising out of chaos, and the building-up of a number of superstructures, bearing the signs of transitoriness and imperfection, finally to be replaced by the solid fabric of a coherent whole.
In this little book some of the earlier builders on the scrap-heap will be noted—the Greek philosopher, Aristotle; the Belgian anatomist, Vesalius; the Englishmen, Tyson and Prichard; the Swede, Linnaeus; the Frenchman, Buffon; and the German, Blumenbach. These laid the foundations of the science, and each is claimed as the true founder of Anthropology. After these the workers become more numerous and more specialised, and they will be dealt with under the separate headings of the various branches of the subject in which they laboured, rather than in a continuous chronological order.
“Meddling with questions of merit or priority is a thorny business at the best of times,” as Huxley said; and completeness is not here aimed at. Mention can be made only of those whose work notably contributed to, or illustrates, the historical growth of the science.
It may be objected that too much attention has been given to the arm-chair workers, and too little to the labourers in the field. This is true, especially in the section on Ethnology; but it is necessitated by the compass of the volume. We attempt a brief sketch of the wood, and cannot stop to describe the individual trees that compose it. Detailed investigations, however valuable, have to be merged into generalisations; and generalisations proceed mainly from the arm-chairs.
Professor Michael Foster somewhere remarked that “hypothesis is the salt of science.” The main difficulty with which observers in the field have to contend is that, as a rule, they can see only what they look for. When an investigator has left his field and is working up his results at home, he only too frequently finds that he has omitted to look for certain customs or beliefs, whose occurrence in other places he had either over-looked or forgotten. This is the justification for the questionnaires. It is one of the most important functions of stay-at-home synthetic students laboriously to cull data from the vast literature of anthropology, travel, and ancient and modern history, and to weld them into coherent hypotheses. The student at home in this way suggests fresh inquiries to the field ethnologist, and a richer harvest is the result. The most valuable generalisations are made, however, when the observer is at the same time a generaliser; but “doubtless,” as Maharbal said to Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, “the gods have not bestowed everything on the same man. You, Hannibal, know how to conquer; but you do not know how to use your victory.”
The vastness of the anthropological sciences and the nebulous character of their demarcation from other sciences render their definition or classification a peculiarly difficult matter. Even at the present day students are not agreed upon the exact terminology and limitations of the various branches of their subject; but, after all, these are little more than academic discussions, since investigations go on irrespective of boundary lines. Those who are really worried about this “terminological inexactitude” are the cataloguers and librarians, who frequently are at a loss where to place items in their catalogues or books on their shelves. It was mainly from this point of view that Dieserud was constrained to write his Science of Anthropology: Its Scope and Content.[[1]] This useful little book deals very fully in historical order with the questions referred to above, and it may be recommended to those who are interested in these somewhat profitless discussions.
[1]. This is the title on the back of the book. Its designation on the title-page is given correctly in the Bibliography.
For the convenience of those who require landmarks we here give the scheme that is roughly followed in this book, which is based upon the classification recently proposed by the Board of Studies in Anthropology of the University of London as a guide for the study and teaching of Anthropology:—
A.—Physical Anthropology (Anthropography, Anthropology of some writers)