After a photograph.
In 1851 Professor Daniel Wilson, in his Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, first brought into use the designation “prehistoric” as expressing “the whole period disclosed to us by means of archæological evidence, as distinguished from what is known through written records; and in this sense the term was speedily adopted by the archæologists of Europe.”[1610] Eleven years later he published his Prehistoric Man: Researches into the origin of civilization in the old and new world.[1611] The book unfortunately is not well fortified with references, but it is the result of long study, partly in the field, and written with a commendable reserve of judgment. It is in the main concerned with the western hemisphere, which he assumes with little hesitation “began its human period subsequent to that of the old world, and so started later in the race of civilization.” While thus in effect a study of early man in America, its scope makes it in good degree a complement to the Origin of Civilization of Lubbock.
The comparative study of ethnological traces, to enable us to depict the earliest condition of human society, owes a special indebtedness to Edward B. Tylor, among writers in English. It is nearly twenty-five years since he first published his Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization,[1612] the work almost, if not quite, of a pioneer in this interesting field, and he has supplied the reader with all the references necessary to test his examples. Max Müller (Chips, ii. 262) has pointed out how he has vitalized his vast accumulation of facts by coherent classifications instead of leaving them an oppressive burden by simple aggregation, as his precursors in Germany, Gustav Klemm[1613] and Adolf Bastian, had done; and it is remarked that while thus classifying, he has not been lured into pronounced theory, which future accession of material might serve to modify or change. He shortly afterwards touched a phase of the subject which he had not developed in his book in a paper on “Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man,”[1614] and illustrated the methods he was pursuing in another on “The Condition of Prehistoric Races as inferred from observations of modern tribes.”[1615]
The postulate of which he has been a distinguished expounder, that man has progressed from barbarism to civilization, was a main deduction to be drawn from his next sustained work, Primitive Culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom.[1616] The chief points of this further study of the thought, belief, art, and custom of the primitive man had been advanced tentatively in various other papers beside those already mentioned,[1617] and in this new work he further acknowledges his obligations to Adolf Bastian’s Mensch in der Geschichte and Theodor Waitz’s Anthropologie der Naturvölker.[1618] He still pursued his plan of collecting wide and minute evidence from the writers on ethnography and kindred sciences, and from historians, travellers, and missionaries, as his foot-notes abundantly testify.
THEODOR WAITZ.
After a likeness in Otto Caspari’s Urgeschichte der Menschheit, 2d ed., vol. i. (Leipzig, 1877).
These studies of Professor Tylor abundantly qualified him to give a condensed exposition of the science of anthropology, which he had done so much to place within the range of scientific studies, by a primary search for facts and laws; and having contributed the article on that subject to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, he published in 1881 his Anthropology: an Introduction to the study of man and civilization (London and N. Y., 1881 and 1888). He maps out the new science, which has now received of late years so many new students in the scientific method, without references, but with the authority of a teacher, tracing what man has been and is under the differences of sex, race, beliefs, habits, and society.[1619] Again, at the Montreal meeting (August, 1884) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he set down in an address the bounds of the “American Aspects of Anthropology.”[1620]
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK.