The Natural History of the Varieties of Man

by R. G. Latham

V.

Ethnology is more immediately connected with history; differing from it chiefly in its object, its method, and its arena.

VI.

Whilst history represents the actions of men as determined by moral, ethnology ascertains the effects of physical influences.

VII.

History collects its facts from testimony, and ethnology does the same; but ethnology deals with problems upon which history is silent, by arguing backwards, from effect to cause.

VIII.

This throws the arena of the ethnologist into an earlier period of the world's history than that of the proper historian.

IX.

It is the method of arguing from effect to cause which gives to ethnology its scientific, in opposition to its literary, aspect; placing it, thereby, in the same category with geology, as a palæontological science.[193] Hence it is the science of a method—a method by which inference does the work of testimony. Furthermore, ethnology is history in respect to its results; geology in respect to its method. And in the same way that geology has its zoological, physiological and such other aspects as constitute it a mixed science; ethnology has them also.