CHAPTER LI
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY
These two sciences are devoted to the study of mankind before written history began; and they have an interest for every reader who has asked, when he was a child and had a story told him: “What happened before that?” In the chapter in this Guide on Language and Writing, we have told the story of those two great inventions which made civilization possible. The present chapter is devoted to the story of man before writing was commonly used—that is, before historical documents could exist.
Just as the study of children and their habits is something new and peculiarly characteristic of the last generation, so these sciences of anthropology and ethnology which deal with the childhood of the human race are of recent origin. But in comparison with child-psychology these two sciences are at a disadvantage in a very important respect: there are always children to be studied, but the childhood of the race is long past and remote from the student of it, save for the primitive tribes which can still be observed, and even these tribes are now scattered and few, and by contact with civilization they are rapidly losing the characteristics which invite scientific study. A hundred years ago, the opportunities for experiment and observation were far greater, but at that time savages were not seriously studied. There could, indeed, be no “science of man” before the evolutionary theory of Darwin, Wallace and Huxley had been generally accepted. Throughout this Guide we see how this theory has affected all our modern thought, modified our sciences, and even created new sciences. The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica may, indeed, be described as the authoritative and interesting story of the human activities, critically studied from the point of view of evolution. The trustworthy material is chiefly derived from observations in Australia, in the South Seas, among the North American Indians and among the still savage tribes of Africa, and from studies of the tools and other remains of early peoples. All broad conclusions must be based upon the similarity of customs among races widely separated by time and place, and upon the fact that some traces of such customs are still found among more highly civilized peoples.
The first article in a course of reading on the “science of man” in the Britannica is Anthropology (Vol. 2, p. 108), equivalent to 40 pages in this Guide, illustrated, by Prof. Tylor, of Oxford University, one of the founders of the science, and author of Researches into the Early History of Mankind, Primitive Culture, etc.
Man’s Origin
This great article deals first with “man’s place in Nature,” the most interesting branch of the theory of evolution. Prof. Tylor traces back the recognition of man’s structural similarity to the higher apes to Linnaeus (1735) and to the less scientific Lord Monboddo (1774 and 1778), whose simple literary style as well as his theory of the descent of man aroused the amusement and scorn of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said that Monboddo was “as jealous of his tail as a squirrel.”
Dr. Tylor remarks that:
There are few ideas more ingrained in ancient and low civilization than that of relationship by descent between the lower animals and man. Savage and barbaric religions recognize it, and the mythology of the world has hardly a more universal theme. But in educated Europe such ideas had long been superseded by the influence of theology and philosophy, with which they seemed too incompatible.
But in 1843 Dr. J. C. Prichard, to whom Tylor gives the title that many would give to Tylor himself, “founder of modern anthropology,” insisted that
man is but an animal ... composed of the same materials, and framed on the same principles, as the creatures which he has tamed to be the servile instruments of his will, or slays for his daily food.