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Title: History of anthropology
Author: Alfred C. Haddon
A. Hingston Quiggin
Release date: November 17, 2023 [eBook #72158]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Watts & Co, 1910
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Last Edit of Project Info
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY ***
[Illustration:
E. B. TYLOR.
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HISTORY OF
ANTHROPOLOGY
BY
+ALFRED C. HADDON+,
M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S., Fellow of Christ’s College,
University Reader in Ethnology, Cambridge,
WITH THE HELP OF
+A. HINGSTON QUIGGIN+,
M.A., formerly of Newnham College, Cambridge
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Printed in Great Britain
by Watts & Co.,Johnson’s Court,
Fleet Street, London, E.C.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
-------
It is with great diffidence that we offer this little book to the
public, it being, so far as we are aware, the first attempt at a history
of Anthropology. A book of small size which deals with so vast a
subject, comprising, as it does, so many different studies, cannot
satisfy the specialists in the several departments. In many branches the
investigations are so recent that they can hardly be said to have a
history, and in some cases their originators are still alive. Doubtless
many will criticise the amount of space allocated to certain authors,
and wonder why others have been omitted or have received but scanty
recognition. All we can say in extenuation for our selection is that the
task has been by no means an easy one, and we have partly been guided by
the fact that our readers will mainly be of British nationality. It has
been impossible to mention all of the more important of living workers,
whether investigators, collectors, or systematisers; but this is not due
to any lack of appreciation of their labours. In most cases references
are given in the text; a few supplemental works will be found in the
Bibliography at the end of the book. The two dates which follow a name
refer to the years of the individual’s birth and death; a single date
refers to the date of publication of the book or memoir.
We hope we have in all cases referred to the authors to whom we are
indebted for information; and for personal assistance we desire to thank
Dr. C. S. Myers, of Gonville and Caius College; Mr. E. E. Sikes, Tutor
of St. John’s College, Cambridge; and Mr. Edward Clodd.
A. C. H.
_October, 1910._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
-------
PREFACE v
INTRODUCTION 1-5
_PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY._
CHAPTER I
THE PIONEERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 6-27
Definition of the word “Anthropology.” Fundamental conceptions. Race
discrimination: in Bushman paintings, in the art of ancient Egypt,
Assyria, etc., in Vedic literature. Hippocrates. Aristotle. Vesalius.
Spigel. Tyson. Pygmies. Linnæus. Buffon. Blumenbach. Monsters and Wild
Men.
CHAPTER II.
THE SYSTEMATISERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 28-49
Craniology: Blumenbach, the founder of Craniology. Camper and the facial
angel. Various early craniologists. Retzius and the Cephalic Index.
Grattan. Broca. Topinard. De Quatrefages. Virchow. Sergi. Hagen’s and
Macalister’s criticisms of craniometry. Anthropometry: White and others.
Measurements and observations of living populations: Beddoe. Virchow.
Methods of dealing with anthropometrical data: Indices. Averages.
Seriations. Curves. Mathematical treatment: Quetelet. Galton. Karl
Pearson. Scientific and practical value of anthropometry: In the origin
and differentiation of man. Racial history. Heredity. Galton.
Miscegenation. The effect of the environment. Test of physical fitness.
Identification of criminals. Bertillon. Galton.
CHAPTER III.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES 50-69
Origin of man. Polygenism and Monogenism. Lawrence. Lord Monboddo.
Lamarck. Cuvier. Étienne Saint-Hilaire. Robert Chambers: _Vestiges of
Creation_. Herbert Spencer. Darwin: _Origin of Species_. The negro’s
place in nature. James Hunt.
CHAPTER IV.
THE UNFOLDING OF THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 70-78
Fossil man. Cannstadt, Neanderthal, Spy, and other finds. _Homo
Heidelbergensis, Homo primigenius, Pithecanthropus erectus._
CHAPTER V.
COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY 79-87
Phrenology. Psychical research. Methods and aims of Psychology. Ethnical
psychology. Bastian. Folk psychology. Experimental psychology. Eugenics.
CHAPTER VI.
THE CLASSIFICATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF MAN 88-98
Race description and classification. Bernier. Linnæus. Blumenbach. Other
classifications. Pruner Bey. Bory de S. Vincent. Isidore Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire. Haeckel. Broca and Topinard. Flower. Deniker. Keane.
Man’s place in nature. Huxley. Vogt.
_CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY._
CHAPTER VII.
ETHNOLOGY: ITS SCOPE AND SOURCES 99-110
Definition. Sources. Herodotus. Lucretius. Strabo. Travellers.
Missionaries. Systematic works on Ethnology. Prichard. Other
generalisations. Ethnology and the Classics. Ethnology and Political
Science.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE HISTORY OF ARCHÆOLOGICAL DISCOVERY 111-125
Prehistoric man. Flint implements. Denmark. Caves: Oreston. Kirkdale.
Liège. Kent’s Cavern. Lake dwellings. Irish crannogs. Swiss pile
dwellings. Brixham Cave. Boucher de Perthes. Subsequent progress of
Archæology. France. Britain. Germany, etc. Tertiary man. Eoliths.
CHAPTER IX.
TECHNOLOGY 126-127
Pitt-Rivers. Otis T. Mason. H. Balfour. H. Colley March. Stolpe.
CHAPTER X.
SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGION 128-143
Comparative Ethnology. Tylor. Avebury. Sociology. Comte. Buckle. Herbert
Spencer. Bachofen, Morgan, McLennan, and others. Magic and Religion.
Anthropology and Religion. Folklore. Comparative Religion.
CHAPTER XI.
LINGUISTICS 144-148
The Aryan controversy. Language and Race.
CHAPTER XII.
CULTURAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE INFLUENCE OF 149-152
ENVIRONMENT
Gallatin. Wilhelm von Humboldt. Hippocrates. Buffon. Alexander von
Humboldt, Ritter, and Waitz. Buckle. Ratzel. Reclus. Le Play.
RETROSPECT 153
BIBLIOGRAPHY 155
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 74
CHAPELLE-AUX-SAINTS
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.
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.
Footnote 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)
(_a_) _Zoological_ (somatology, including craniology, etc.).—Man’s
place in Nature as evidenced by the study of comparative
anatomy and physiology, more especially of the
Anthropoidea.
(_b_) _Palæontological._—The antiquity of man as evidenced by fossil
and semi-fossilised remains, including the geological
evidence.
(_c_) _Physiological and Psychological._—The comparative study of the
bodily functions and mental processes.
(_d_) _Ethnological._—The comparative study of the physical characters
which distinguish the various races and sub-races of man.
Classification of the human race in accordance with
physical and psychical characters. Geographical
distribution of the varieties of mankind. The influence
of environment on physique.
_B._—CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY (Ethnology of some writers).
(_a_) _Archæological._—The antiquity of man as revealed by the
earliest remains of his handiwork. The prehistoric
periods; their characteristics, sequence, and duration.
The survival of early conditions of culture in later
times (Folklore).
(_b_) _Technological._—The comparative study of arts and industries;
their origin, development, and geographical distribution.
(_c_) _Sociological._—The comparative study of social phenomena and
organisation. Birth, education, marriage, and death
customs and systems. Social and religious associations.
Government and laws. Moral ideas and codes. Magical and
religious ideas and practices.
(_d_) _Linguistic._—The comparative study of language.
(_e_) _Ethnological._—The comparative study and classification of
peoples based upon cultural conditions and
characteristics. The influence of environment upon
culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I.
THE PIONEERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
[Sidenote: =Definition of the word “Anthropology.”=]
ARISTOTLE, “the father of them that know,” as Dante called him, is
credited with having coined the word “anthropologist”; but he did not
employ it in a very complimentary sense. Describing a lofty-minded man
in his _Ethics_, he terms him ουκ ανθρωπολογος—not a gossip, not a
talker about himself. But the word does not seem to have supplied a
permanent want in the Greek world, and we meet it next in a Latin form
in the sixteenth century. _Anthropologium_ was then used in a restricted
sense, relating to man’s bodily structure; and the first work in which
it occurs is generally stated to be Magnus Hundt’s _Anthropologium de
hominis dignitate_, which appeared in 1501, and dealt in a general way
with human anatomy and physiology.
The first appearance of the word in English was probably in the
seventeenth century, when an anonymous book was published bearing the
title _Anthropologie Abstracted; or, The idea of Humane nature reflected
in briefe Philosophicall and anatomical collections_ (1655). The author
defines his subject thus:—
Anthropologie, or the history of human nature, is, in the vulgar
(yet just) impression, distinguished into two volumes: the first
entitled _Psychologie_, the nature of the rational soule
discoursed; the other anatomie, or the fabrick or structure of
the body of man revealed in dissection ... of the former we
shall in a distracted rehersall, deliver our collections.[2]
Footnote 2:
See Bendyshe, p. 356.
The meaning of the word was scarcely clear in the beginning of the
nineteenth century, when we find, in the _British Encyclopædia_ of 1822,
the following definitions, “A discourse upon human nature,” and “Among
Divines, that manner of expression by which the inspired writers
attribute human parts and passions to God.”
Concerning the present use of the term “Anthropology,” few will take
exception to the definition given by Topinard in his _l’Anthropologie_
(1876): “Anthropology is the branch of natural history which treats of
man and the races of man.” It may be yet more succinctly described as
“the science of man,” which comprises two main divisions—the one which
deals with the natural man (ανθρωπος, or _homo_); the other which is
concerned with man in relation to his fellows, or, in other words, with
social man (εθνορ, or _socius_). At the end of the Introduction we give
the classification which we propose to adopt. It should, however, be
stated that, whereas in this country we employ the term “Anthropology”
to cover the whole subject, it is common on the Continent to restrict
the term to what we designate as “Physical Anthropology,”
“Anthropography,” or “Somatology.”
[Sidenote: =Fundamental Conceptions.=]
The beginnings of anthropology may probably be traced to what Professor
Giddings (1896) has termed the “consciousness of kind,” but what Dr.
McDougall (1898) has more definitely recognised as showing the
gregarious impulse. He says (pp. 299-300):—
The gregarious impulse of any animal receives satisfaction only
through the presence of animals similar to itself, and the
closer the similarity the greater is the satisfaction.... Just
so, in any human being the instinct operates most powerfully in
relation to, and receives the highest degree of satisfaction
from the presence of, the human beings who most closely resemble
that individual, those who behave in like manner and respond to
the same situations with similar emotions.
[Illustration:
_Andree, Parallelen. N. r. Tafel. III._
BUSHMEN RAIDING KAFIR CATTLE.
(_After R. Andree._)
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
RACE PORTRAITURE OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS
on the tombs of the Kings at Biban-el-Molouk (XVIIIth-XXIst Dynasty).
]
[Sidenote: =Race Discrimination.=]
The recognition of degrees of likeness implies the recognition of
unlikeness. This may be termed the stage of race discrimination. Ancient
literature and the pictorial art of certain uncivilised peoples abound
in examples of race discrimination. The crude representations of human
beings discovered in caves in France and elsewhere were probably
intended to portray the people themselves, who lived in the palæolithic
period. These drawings or carvings, like those of most modern savages,
exhibit much greater skill in delineating animals than human beings;
consequently it is dangerous to rely on them as representing the
physical characteristics of the then existing populations. Very
different is the famous Bushman pictograph of a fight between Bushmen
and Kafirs. Here relative size, the difference in colour, and the
employment of different implements of war by these two races, are
strikingly exemplified; but as a general rule the Bushmen themselves
exaggerate certain features and minimise others—for example, the head is
invariably too small and featureless.
In Egypt there is an immense amount of pictorial and sculptured material
for ethnological study, covering a range of many centuries. Over three
thousand years ago the artists—“untrained but not unobservant
ethnologists”[3]—decorated the walls of royal tombs with representations
of the four races of mankind, among whom the Egyptians of the nineteenth
dynasty supposed the world to be partitioned—(1) The Egyptians, whom
they painted red; (2) the Asiatics or Semites, yellow; (3) the Southerns
or Negroes, black; and (4) the Westerns or Northerners, white, with blue
eyes and fair beards. Each type is clearly differentiated by peculiar
dress and characteristic features. In addition to these four types,
other human varieties were delineated by the Ancient Egyptians, most of
which can be identified. “On the Egyptian monuments we not only find
very typical portraits, but also an attempt at classification; for the
Egyptians were a scientific people, with a knowledge of medicine, and
also skilled mathematicians; therefore their primitive anthropology is
not unexpected.”[4] This facility for race discrimination was still
earlier exhibited in the prehistoric or early historic slate palettes of
Egypt.
Footnote 3:
D. Randall-Maciver and A. Wilkin, _Libyan Notes_, 1901, p. 1.
Footnote 4:
_Man_, viii., 1908, p. 129.
Belonging to the fifth century B.C. are the realistic portraiture
figurines in pottery discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie at
Memphis,[5] “which clearly are copied from various races which were
welded together by the Persians, and who all met in the foreign
settlement at Memphis.” Professor Petrie identifies Sumerians or
Accadians, the old Turanian people who started civilisation in
Babylonia. “Their heads are identified by closely similar portraits
carved in stone about 3000 B.C., and found in Mesopotamia.” Persians,
Scythians, Mongols, and even Indians, are also recognised by him; but
some of the latter are dated by him at about 200 B.C.
Footnote 5:
Poole, _l.c._
Assyrian monuments are less explicit in this respect.
The Assyrians themselves are shown to have been of a very pure
type of Semites; but in the Babylonians there is a sign of
Cushite blood.... There is one portrait of an Elamite (Cushite)
king on a vase found at Susa; he is painted black, and thus
belongs to the Cushite race. The Ethiopian type can be clearly
seen in the reliefs depicting the Assyrian wars with the kings
of Ethiopia; but it is hard to discriminate Arabs and Jews from
Assyrians; in fact, it is only in the time of good art that
distinctions are traceable.[6]
Footnote 6:
H. H. Risley, _The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Ethnographic
Glossary_, i., 1892, p. xxxviii.
Rock carvings in Persia, Scythian coins, and numerous other monuments
and remains from other countries and belonging to diverse ages,
illustrate that the head-form, features, character of the hair and mode
of wearing it, ornaments, dress, and weapons, were all recognised as
means of discriminating between different peoples from the earliest
times.
Ancient literature, of which one example must suffice, tells the same
tale:—
The sense of differences of colour, which, for all our talk of
common humanity, still plays a great and, politically, often an
inconvenient part in the history of the world, finds forcible
expression in the Vedic descriptions of the people whom the
Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. In a
well-known passage the god Indra is praised for having protected
the Aryan colour, and the word meaning colour (_varna_) is used
down to the present day as the equivalent of caste, more
especially with reference to the castes believed to be of Aryan
descent.[7]
Footnote 7:
_Report Brit. Assoc._, 1881, p. 683.
The word “caste” is of Portuguese origin. In the 179th hymn of the first
Mandala of the Rig-Veda, as Dr. Gerson da Cunha points out,[8] the word
_varna_ is used in the dual number, _ubhau varnau_, “two colours,” white
of the Aryans and black of the Dasyus—that is, of the “Dravidian”
aborigines, who are elsewhere called “black-skinned,” “unholy,”
“excommunicated.” Other texts dwell on their low stature, coarse
features, and their voracious appetite. The Rig-Veda employs the word
_anâsa_—“noseless”—to characterise the Dasyus and Daityas, which
designations mean “thieves” or “demons.” It is hardly an exaggeration to
say that from these sources there might be compiled a fairly accurate
anthropological definition of the jungle tribes of to-day.
Footnote 8:
“Presidential Address: The Nasal Index in Biological Anthropology,”
_Journ. Anth. Soc. of Bombay_, 1892, p. 542.
Thus were the foundations of descriptive anthropology unconsciously
laid.
In our own day racial characters are seized upon in the same manner, and
racial antipathy adds fuel to its own fire in regarding traits which
differ from those of the speaker or writer as being ugly, objectionable,
or of low type. “The study of race,” said the late Sir William Flower
(1831-1899), “is at a low ebb indeed when we hear the same contemptuous
epithet of ‘nigger’ applied indiscriminately by the English abroad to
the blacks of the West Coast of Africa, to Kafirs of Natal, the Lascars
of Bombay, the Hindoos of Calcutta, the aborigines of Australia, and
even the Maories of New Zealand.”[9] The Englishman who contemns as a
“nigger” any dark-skinned native has not advanced in race discrimination
beyond his remote kinsman who crossed into the valley of the Indus some
four thousand years ago.
Footnote 9:
_Report Brit. Assoc._, 1881, p. 683.
[Sidenote: =Hippocrates.=]
Hippocrates (460-357 B.C.), “the Father of Physic,” was certainly a
pioneer in physical anthropology. He says: “I will pass over the smaller
differences among nations, but will now treat of such as are great
either from nature or custom; and, first, concerning the macrocephali.
There is no other race of men which have heads in the least resembling
theirs.” He believed that this elongated conformation of the head was
originally produced artificially; but subsequently it was inherited, or,
as he puts it: “Thus, at first usage operated, so that this constitution
was the result of force; but in the course of time it was formed
naturally, so that usage had nothing to do with it”—a view adopted many
centuries later by Buffon and others.
[Sidenote: =Aristotle.=]
Not only was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) the first authority to make use of
the word “anthropology,”[10] but he may also be described as an
anthropologist. Material had been collected by travellers, such as
Hanno, the Carthaginian, who encountered gorillas in Africa; by
historians, such as Herodotus (who was also a traveller); and by
doctors, such as Hippocrates. Aristotle was indebted to some extent to
all of these; but his vast works in natural history were based mainly on
what he considered of primary importance—facts of actual personal
knowledge derived from personal observation. On this account alone his
writings deserved the place which they held for many centuries.
Footnote 10:
Cf. p. 6.
Thus, undisturbed by the dogmas of religion or philosophy, he placed man
naturally among the animals (being thus, as Topinard remarks, about
twenty centuries ahead of humanity), but distinguished from them by
certain features—by the relative size of the brain, by two-leggedness,
by mental characters, etc. Some writers regard it as improbable that
either Hippocrates or Aristotle had ever dissected the human body, but
it is also possible to hold an opposite view. Even Galen (c. 130 A.D.),
whose anatomy held the field for more than a thousand years, had to base
his conclusions on the bodies of animals, notably on those of monkeys;
and, although he did not conceal the fact, it was not until the time of
Vesalius that the discrepancy between simian and human anatomy was
discovered.
[Sidenote: =Vesalius.=]
Vesalius (1513-1564) is the next great name in the history of physical
anthropology. He was Professor of Anatomy at Padua, Bologna, and Pisa,
and physician to Charles V. and Philip II. His work marks a revolution
in anatomical science; for not only did he overthrow the doctrines which
had been accepted for fourteen centuries, demonstrating that to a great
extent Galen had studied the anatomy of the ape rather than that of man,
but, by his own deductions from direct observation and original
research, he established a fresh and unassailable foundation for future
investigation. His services to anatomy have been compared to those of
Galileo and Copernicus in the field of astronomy. His fate was not
unlike that of many other daring pioneers of the Middle Ages. He was
accused of having dissected a man while yet alive, and was dragged by
his enemies before the Inquisition and condemned to death. By the
intercession of the king his sentence was commuted into a pilgrimage to
the Holy Sepulchre; but on his return journey he was shipwrecked and
drowned off the island of Zante.
Cunningham, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological
Institute, 1908, refers to the work of Vesalius, whom he describes as
one of the most remarkable figures in the sixteenth century. He adds:—
It is interesting to note in passing that certain racial
distinctions did not escape the eye of Vesalius. “It appears,”
he remarks, “that most nations have something peculiar in the
shape of the head. The crania of the Genoese, and, still more
remarkable, those of the Greeks and Turks, are globular in form.
This shape, which they esteem elegant and well adapted to their
practice of enveloping the head in the folds of their turbans,
is often produced by the midwives at the solicitation of the
mother.” He further observes “that the Germans had generally a
flattened occiput and broad head, because the children are
always laid on their backs in the cradles; and that the Belgians
have a more oblong form, because the children are allowed to
sleep on their sides.”
We know that more or less continuous pressure is exerted on the pliable
heads of infants to produce admired shapes, but the theory was carried
rather too far when adduced, some centuries later, to account for the
facial features of negroes. Lawrence, in his _Lectures on Comparative
Anatomy_, attributed the flat noses and thick lips of the negro to the
method of carrying babies in Africa. The negro mothers, while at work,
carry their infants on their backs, and “in the violent motions required
for their hard labour, as in beating or pounding millet, the face of the
child is said to be constantly thumping against the back of the mother.”
By this rude treatment the face of the negro child was supposed to be
moulded into shape; but, as Cunningham points out, no attempt was made
to explain how the process of bumping produced exactly opposite results
in the case of the nose and lips—reducing the prominence of the former
and increasing the projection of the latter.
[Sidenote: =Spigel.=]
“The invention of the ‘lineæ cephalometricæ’ of Spigel, who died in the
early part of the seventeenth century, may perhaps be regarded as
constituting the earliest scientific attempt at cranial measurement.” He
drew four lines in certain directions, and a skull in which these lines
were equal to each other he regarded as regularly proportioned.
“Although these lines are evidently not sufficient for the comparative
ethnography of the present day, yet it is interesting to observe that,
in ascending the zoological scale, these lines approximate equality just
in proportion as the head measured approaches the human form.”[11]
Footnote 11:
J. Aitken Meigs, _North American Med.-Chir. Rev._, 1861, p. 840.
[Sidenote: =Tyson.=]
Johann Sperling, author of a _Physica anthropologia_ (1668), and Samuel
Haworth, who wrote _Anthropologia; or A philosophical discourse
concerning man_ (1680), also belong to the seventeenth century. But more
important is the work of Edward Tyson, a Cambridge man, who took his
degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1678. He was a Fellow, and later Censor,
of the College of Physicians, Fellow of the Royal Society, and writer of
numerous papers on anatomy. His fame rests mainly on the work which laid
the foundations of comparative morphology, _Orang-Outang, sive Homo
Sylvestris: or The Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey,
an Ape, and a Man_ (1699). This was the first attempt to deal with the
anatomy of any of the anthropoid apes, and shows very conspicuous
ability on the part of the author. He compared the structure of man with
that of the monkeys, and came to the conclusion that the pygmy formed a
kind of intermediate animal between the two. The pygmy was, as a matter
of fact, a chimpanzee, and its skeleton, which was thus early recognised
as the “missing link,” is still to be seen in the Natural History Museum
(British Museum) at South Kensington. Tyson added to his work on the
_Anatomy of the Pygmie, A Philological Essay, Concerning the Pygmies,
the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein it
will appear that they are all either Apes or Monkeys, and not Men as
formerly pretended._ The purpose of the _Essay_ may be expressed in his
own words:—
If therefore I can make out ... that there were such _Animals_
as _Pygmies_; and that they were not a _Race_ of _Men_, but
_Apes_; and can discover the _Authors_, who have forged all, or
most of the idle Stories concerning them; and shew how the Cheat
in after Ages has been carried on, by embalming the Bodies of
_Apes_, then exposing them for the _Men_ of the Country, from
whence they brought them: If I can do this, I shall think my
time not wholly lost, nor the trouble altogether useless, that I
have had in this Enquiry.
[Sidenote: =The Pygmies.=]
This was the first attempt to explain in a rational fashion the
innumerable tales found in all parts of the world about the existence of
pygmy races, ape-men or men-apes. Tyson’s hypothesis was that all these
legends were based on imperfect observations of apes, and he was
followed by Buffon and others. It may be well here briefly to note the
researches which have led in late years to the opposite
conclusion—_i.e._, that the tales relate to a dwarf race of men formerly
very widely spread over the globe.
This theory is mainly associated with the name of de Quatrefages
(1810-1892). In the Introduction to his book on the pygmies he says:
“For a long time past the small black races have attracted my attention
and my interest in a special manner.” His earliest investigations of the
subject were published in 1862, and continued until 1887. Analysing the
evidence, he shows that the two localities where the ancients appear to
place their pygmies (the interior of Africa and the southern-most parts
of Asia), together with the characters assigned to them, indicate an
actual knowledge of the two groups of small people (Negrilloes and
Negritoes), who are still to be found in those regions. Professor J.
Kollmann, of Basel, in his _Pygmäen in Europa_ (1894), argues for the
existence of a European pygmy race in Neolithic times from some remains
found at Schaffhausen, and the wide prevalence of short statures among
many peoples in Europe, especially in the south. Mr. David MacRitchie
attributes not only legends of pygmies, but fairy-tales in general, to
this prehistoric dwarf race. President Windle sums up the question
thus:—
It is possible with more or less accuracy and certainty to
identify most of those races which, described by the older
writers, had been rejected by their successors. Time has brought
their revenge to Aristotle and Pliny by showing that they were
right, where Tyson, and even Buffon, were wrong. (P. liii.)
In the time of Aristotle Man took his place naturally at the head of the
other animals, being distinguished from the brutes by certain
characters. But the influence of religion and of philosophy did not long
permit of this association. Man came to be regarded as the _chef
d’œuvre_ of creation, a thing apart, a position aptly described in the
words of Saint Paul (marginal version) “for a little while inferior to
the angels.”
In the eighteenth century came a startling change. Man was wrenched from
this detached and isolated attitude, and linked on once more to the
beasts of the field. This was the work of Linnæus.
[Sidenote: =Linnæus.=]
The year 1707 is memorable in the history of Anthropology as the date of
the birth of two of its greatest men, Linnæus[12] (1707-1778) and Buffon
(1707-1788). Both devoted long lives to science, and both produced
monumental works of permanent value; but it would be hard to find two
contemporary figures engaged in the same pursuit whose lives presented a
greater contrast.
Footnote 12:
By a patent of nobility conferred in 1757 Linnæus became Karl von
Linné.
Linnæus was the son of a poor pastor, and his mother was the daughter of
the former pastor of the same small Swedish parish. At the early age of
four young Karl is said to have taken an interest in botany, and to have
begun to ask questions that his father could not answer. Either to
escape this interrogation, or for wiser motives, the father made it a
rule never to answer the same question twice, and to this early
discipline Linnæus used to trace his tenacious memory. The boy was
intended for the ministry, and was early sent to school; but, as he
devoted all his time to botany, his progress in theology was _nil_, and
when, after two years, his father visited the school, and learnt of the
disappointing result of all the pinching and saving which had gone to
provide for the son’s education, he resolved to apprentice him to a
tailor or shoemaker in hopes of obtaining a better return for his
outlay. Fortunately a friend intervened, and gave the boy board and
lodging, besides private tuition, while he finished his gymnasium
course. His work as a student seems to have failed to satisfy his
instructors, for when he proceeded to the University of Lund it was with
the enigmatic testimonial to the effect that “some shrubs in a garden
may disappoint the cares of the gardener, but if transplanted into
different soil may prosper.”
When barely twenty-two he left Lund for Upsala, taking with him his
entire fortune of £8, and, being inexperienced and unknown, soon found
himself in desperate straits. He was rescued by the generosity of Dr.
Celsius, a professor of theology, but student of botany, who, impressed
with Karl’s collections and enthusiasm, offered him board and lodging,
and obtained for him some private pupils. The hardships of his life were
not yet over, but gradually his work obtained recognition, abroad sooner
than at home, and he could have lived at his ease in England or the
Netherlands; only (as he expressed it), “his Sara was in Sweden,” and he
returned to his native land to scrape together sufficient means to marry
her.
[Sidenote: =Buffon.=]
From the beginning Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was marked
out for a different life. His father was a Burgundian Councillor, and
his mother, besides being an heiress, was a woman of unusual ability. He
was originally destined for the law, but his tastes always inclined
towards science, and he soon found occasion to follow them.
He made the acquaintance of a young Englishman of rank and of his tutor,
who was a man of science, and with them he travelled on the continent.
About the same time Linnæus was also travelling, but in a different
fashion. He set out to make explorations in Lapland, then very little
known, carrying his luggage on his back, and covered nearly 5,000 miles
at a cost of about £25. During his travels he kept a diary[13] of his
observations, which contains not only botanical but also ethnological
information of great value.
Footnote 13:
See _Globus_, “Linné als Ethnologe,” xci., 1907.
While Linnæus was living from hand to mouth, depending for his food on
chance generosity, and mending his boots with folded paper, Buffon was
living the gay life of the young men of his age and rank, and we hear of
him being forced to flee to Paris to escape the results of wounding an
Englishman in a gaming quarrel. (Linnæus was also guilty of drawing his
sword in anger, but the provocation was different. During his absence
from Upsala a rival had, by private influence, contrived to get a
prohibition put on all private lecturing in the University, and he
returned to find all his means of livelihood suddenly cut off.)
Nevertheless Buffon’s life of pleasure did not occupy all his energies.
He possessed, as Voltaire said, “_l’âme d’un sage dans le corps d’un
athlête_,” and while in Paris he wrote and translated various scientific
works, was elected a member of the Academy of Science, and in 1739 was
appointed keeper of the _Jardin du Roi_ and of the Royal Museum.
The permanent value to Anthropology of the work of these two men lies in
the fact that they both “saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” But they
produced results not only distinct, but, in some respects, antagonistic.
Buffon, as Topinard says, did not classify, he described; and the value
of his work has been very differently appraised. Cuvier had small
opinion of it. Camper and Saint-Hilaire considered the author the
greatest naturalist of modern times, the French Aristotle. Topinard
(1885, p. 33) thus describes the opinion of the public: “Le public, lui,
n’hésita pas; dans _l’Histoire naturelle des animaux_ il sentit un
souffle nouveau, vit un pressentiment de l’avenir. La libre pensée était
dans l’air, 89 approchait; l’œuvre de Buffon, comme l’Encyclopédie,
Voltaire, Rousseau et Bougainville, contribua à la Révolution
française.”
The genius of Linnæus lay in classification. Order and method were with
him a passion. In his _Systema Naturæ_ he fixed the place of Man in
Nature, arranging _Homo sapiens_ as a distinct species in the order
_Primates_,[14] together with the apes, the lemurs, and the bats. He
went further and classified the varieties of man, distinguishing them by
skin colour and other characters into four groups—a classification which
holds an honourable place at the present day.
Footnote 14:
The tenth edition, 1758, is the first in which the order _Primates_
occurs. Earlier editions have the order _Anthropomorpha_. See
Bendyshe, p. 424.
All this was abominable in the eyes of Buffon. “Une vérité humiliante
pour l’homme, c’est qu’il doit se ranger lui-même dans la classe des
animaux”; and in another place he exclaims: “Les genres, les ordres, les
classes, n’existent que dans notre imagination.... Ce ne sont que des
idées de convention.... Il n’y a que des individus!” And again: “La
nature ne connait pas nos definitions; elle n’a jamais rangé ses
ouvrages par tas, ni les êtres par genres.”
Nevertheless both rendered incalculable service to the science. Linnæus
“found biology a chaos and left it a cosmos.” “L’anthropologie,” says
Flourens, “surgit d’une grande pensée de Buffon; jusqu-là l’homme
n’avait été étudié que comme individu, Buffon est le premier qui l’ait
envisagé comme espèce.”
But Buffon was no believer in the permanent stability of species.
“Nature is far from subjecting herself to final causes in the formation
of her creatures.” He went so far as to make a carefully veiled hint
(the Sorbonne having eyes on him) of a possible common ancestor for
horse and ass, and of ape and man. At least, he says, so one should
infer from their general resemblance; but, since the Bible affirms the
contrary, “of course the thing cannot be.”[15] In 1751 the old
naturalist was constrained by the Sorbonne to recant his geological
heresies in these words: “I declare that I had no intention to
contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein
related about the Creation, both as to order of time and matter of
fact.”
Footnote 15:
Quoted from Clodd’s _Pioneers of Evolution_, 1897, p. 101.
[Illustration:
J. F. BLUMENBACH
]
[Sidenote: =Blumenbach.=]
It was fortunate for the nascent science that the next great name on its
roll was that of a man of very wide reading, endowed with remarkable
reasoning powers, and with an exceptional perspicuity for sifting out
the true from the false.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) was Professor in the Faculty of
Medicine at Göttingen, and early turned his attention to the special
study of man. He was the first to place anthropology on a rational
basis, and in his _De generis humani varietate nativa_ (1775-1795) laid
the foundations of race classification based on measurement. He noted
the variations in the shape of the skull and of the face, and may
therefore be regarded as the founder of craniology (see below, p. 28).
Besides the services rendered by Blumenbach to the science of
anthropology in classification and in laying the foundations of
craniology, there was a third field in which his work was perhaps even
more valuable to his contemporaries.
[Sidenote: =Monsters.=]
Every successive age is astonished at the credulity of its predecessor;
but when we remember the grave difficulties which beset the explorer in
the eighteenth century, and the wild “travellers’ tales” which it was
impossible either to verify or to disprove, it is easy to sympathise
with the credence given to the beliefs in “Anthropophagi, and men whose
heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” Tyson, in his _Philological
Essay_, gives a list, chiefly derived from classical writers, of the
“monstrous Productions,” belief in which had not altogether died out in
the seventeenth century. In fact, it was not long before Tyson’s time
that a distinguished naturalist had given a serious description of the
mermen who lived in the sea and had their hinder parts covered with
scales.[16] Tyson’s account of “Monstrous sorts of Men” is taken mainly
from Strabo:—
Footnote 16:
v. Cunningham, p. 24.
Such are the _Amukteres_ or _Arrhines_, that want Noses, and
have only two holes above their Mouth; they eat all things, but
they must be raw; they are short lived; the upper part of their
Mouths is very prominent. The _Enotokeitai_, whose Ears reach
down to their Heels, on which they lye and sleep. The _Astomoi_,
that have no Mouths—a civil sort of People, that dwell about the
Head of the _Ganges_; and live upon smelling to boil’d Meats and
the Odours of Fruits and Flowers; they can bear no ill scent,
and therefore can’t live in a Camp. The _Monommatoi_ or
_Monophthalmoi_, that have but one Eye, and that in the middle
of their Foreheads: they have Dogs’ Ears; their Hair stands on
end, but smooth on the Breasts. The _Sternophthalmoi_, that have
Eyes in their Breasts. The _Panai sphenokephaloi_ with Heads
like Wedges. The _Makrokephaloi_, with great Heads. The
_Huperboreoi_, who live a Thousand years. The _Okupodes_, so
swift that they will out-run a Horse. The _Opisthodaktuloi_,
that go with their Heels forward, and their Toes backwards. The
_Makroskeleis_, the _Steganopodes_, the _Monoskeleis_, who have
one Leg, but will jump a great way, and are call’d _Sciapodes_,
because when they lye on their Backs, with this Leg they can
keep the Sun from their bodies.
[Sidenote: =Wild Men.=]
Linnæus did not include these in his _Homo Monstrosus_; but various
questionable creatures are inserted by his pupil Hoppius in the treatise
_Anthropomorpha of Linnæus_, read in 1760.[17] Such were the _Satyr_ of
Vulpius, who, “when it went to bed, put its head on the pillow, and
covered its shoulders with the counterpane, and lay quite quiet like a
respectable woman”; _Lucifer_ (_Homo caudatus_), the “dreadful foul
animals—running about like cats,” who rowed in boats, attacked and
killed a boatload of adventurers, cooking and eating their bodies; and
the _Troglodyta_ (_Homo nocturnus_), who in the East Indies “are caught
and made use of in houses as servants to do the lighter domestic work—as
to carry water, lay the table, and take away the plates.” But all these
were classed among the _Simiæ_. Within the species _Homo sapiens_
Linnæus included wild or natural man, _Homo sapiens ferus_, whose
existence was widely believed in at the time. The most authentic case
was that of “Wild Peter,” the naked brown boy discovered in 1724 in
Hanover. He could not speak, and showed savage and brutish habits and
only a feeble degree of intelligence. He was sent to London, and, under
the charge of Dr. Arbuthnot, became a noted personage, and the subject
of keen discussion among philosophers and naturalists. One of his
admirers, more enthusiastic than the others, declared that his discovery
was more important than that of Uranus, or the discovery of thirty
thousand new stars.
Footnote 17:
Bendyshe, p. 447.
Blumenbach alone, apparently, took the trouble to investigate the origin
of Wild Peter, and in the article he wrote on the subject disposed for
all time of the belief in the existence of “natural man.” He pointed out
that when Peter was first met he wore fastened round his neck the torn
fragments of a shirt, and that the whiteness of his thighs, as compared
with the brown of his legs, showed that he had been wearing breeches and
no stockings. He finally proved that Peter was the dumb child of a
widower, who had been thrust out of his home by a new step-mother.[18]
Footnote 18:
Cunningham, pp. 24-5.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II.
THE SYSTEMATISERS OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
HITHERTO we have been dealing with the great pioneers in Anthropology,
those who laid the foundations, brought order out of chaos, and
suggested the outlines of future work. Henceforward Anthropology may
claim the name of a science, and the work developed on definite lines.
It will be more convenient to treat these separately, abandoning a
strict chronological method.
The first branch to attract workers was Somatology, the physical aspect
of man, of which we have already noted the inception: not until the
nineteenth century can Archæology, or Prehistoric Anthropology, be said
to have developed into a science; while the scientific study of
Ethnology, or Cultural Anthropology, is barely half a century old.
[Sidenote: =Craniology.=]
[Sidenote: =Norma Verticalis of Blumenbach.=]
Somatology had already been foreshadowed by Vesalius, Spigel, and
Linnæus; but Blumenbach was the first to strike its keynote by recording
the shape of the skull and of the face. He was the fortunate possessor
of a large number of skulls—large, that is, for his time, and he
published a description of them (1790-1820), _Decas collectionis suae
craniorum diversarum gentium illustrata_, with 70 plates. He noted
particularly the _norma verticalis_—_i.e._, the shape of the skull as
seen from above, distinguishing by its means three types—the square
shape of the Mongols, the narrow or “pressed in from the sides” shape of
the Negroes, and the intermediate form which he recognised in the
“Caucasians.” He was the first to popularise craniology, and “it became
the fashion to visit the Blumenbachian Museum, to have the differences
which distinguish the different cranial types pointed out, and to
indulge in sentimental rhapsodies upon the beauty and symmetry of the
young female Georgian skull, which was considered to represent the
highest type of all.”[19] But Blumenbach does not seem to have taken
advantage of his own discoveries. In choosing the _norma verticalis_ as
a racial criterion he made a valuable contribution to science, but he
did not reproduce his _normæ_ in his plates, nor did he base his
classification on them. Indeed, his typical Caucasian skull is really
squarer than his typical Mongolian.
Footnote 19:
Cunningham, p. 26.
[Illustration:
UPPER AND SIDE VIEWS OF SKULLS OF MEN
belonging to the Neolithic and Bronze Age Races; photographed by the
Author from specimens in the Cambridge Anatomical Museum.
_A_, Long Barrow, Dinnington, Rotherham. Length, 204 mm.; breadth, 143
mm.; cranial index, 70. 1.
_B_, Winterbourne Stoke. Length, 177 mm.; breadth, 156 mm.; cranial
index, 88. 1.
]
[Sidenote: =Facial Angle of Camper.=]
Peter Camper (1722-1789) had already been studying head-form, though
from a totally different standpoint, and his deductions were not
published until after his death.
His contributions to Anthropology were an essay on the _Physical
Education of the Child_, a lecture on _The Origin and Colour of the
Negro_, and a treatise on _The Orang-outang and some other species of
Apes_; but only his work on the facial angle has attained permanent
fame. His early inclinations were towards art, and he was carefully
trained in drawing, painting, and architecture; and it was in the
interests of Art, not of Anthropology, that the researches which
resulted in his determination of the facial angle came to be undertaken.
This he describes in his preface to his lectures:—
At the age of eighteen, my instructor, Charles Moor the younger,
to whose attention and care I am indebted for any subsequent
progress I may have made in this art, set me to paint one of the
beautiful pieces of Van Tempel, in which there was the figure of
a negro, that by no means pleased me. In his colour he was a
negro, but his features were those of a European. As I could
neither please myself nor gain any proper directions, I desisted
from the undertaking. By critically examining the prints taken
from Guido Reni, C. Marat, Seb. Ricci, and P. P. Rubens, I
observed that they, in painting the countenances of the Eastern
Magi, had, like Van Tempel, painted black men, but they were not
Negroes.
To obtain the necessary facial effects distinguishing the Negro from the
European, Camper devised his system of measurements. He drew a line from
the aperture of the ear to the base of the nose, and another from the
line of the junction of the lips (or, in the case of a skull, from the
front of the incisor teeth) to the most prominent part of the forehead.
“If,” he said, “the projecting part of the forehead be made to exceed
the 100th degree, the head becomes mis-shapen and assumes the appearance
of hydrocephalus or watery head. It is very surprising that the artists
of Ancient Greece should have chosen precisely the maximum, while the
best Roman artists have limited themselves to the 95th degree, which is
not so pleasing. The angle which the facial or characteristic line of
the face makes,” he continued, “varies from 70 to 80 degrees in the
human species. All above is resolved by the rules of art; all below
bears resemblance to that of apes. If I make the facial line lean
forward, I have an antique head; if backward, the head of a Negro. If I
still more incline it, I have the head of an ape; and if more still,
that of a dog, and then that of an idiot.”
Camper’s facial angle may be of service to Art, but since the points
from which the lines are drawn are all variable, owing to the disturbing
influence of other factors, such as an increased length of face or an
unusually prominent brow-ridge, it cannot form an accurate measurement
for Anthropology. It was severely criticised by Blumenbach, Lawrence,
and Prichard, but adopted in France, and by Morton in America.
Dr. J. Aitken Meigs[20] pointed out that as early as 1553 the
measurement of the head appears to have exercised the ingenuity of
Albert Dürer, who, in his _De Symmetriâ Partium in Rectis Formis
Humanorum Corporum_, has given such measurements in almost every view.
These, however, are more artistic in their tendency and scope than
scientific. A glance at some of the outline drawings of Dürer shows
incontestably that the facial line and angle were not wholly unknown to
him, and that Camper has rather elaborated than invented this method of
cranial measurement. The artist even seems to have entertained more
philosophical views of cephalometry, or head measurement, than the
professor.
Footnote 20:
_North American Med.-Chir. Rev._, 1861, p. 840.
[Sidenote: =Various Early Craniologists.=]
The evolution of craniometrical measurements is of interest to the
physical anthropologist, but even a brief recital of this progress would
weary the non-specialist. A history of Anthropology would, however, not
be complete if it ignored the general trend of such investigations.
Some of the early workers, such as Daubenton (1716-99) and Mulder,
Walther, Barclay, and Serres in the first half of the nineteenth
century, attempted to express the relation between the brain-case and
the face by some simple measurement or method of comparison in their
endeavour to formulate not only the differences between the races of
mankind, but also those which obtain between men and the lower animals.
Others during the same period investigated the relations and proportions
of portions of the skull to the whole by means of lines. Spix (1815)
adopted five lines. Herder employed a series of lines radiating from the
atlas (the uppermost bone of the vertebral column); but, more generally,
the _meatus auditorius_ (ear-hole) was the starting-point (Doornik,
1815).
The internal capacity of the skull first received attention from
Tiedemann (1836), who determined it by filling the skull with millet
seed and then ascertaining the weight of the seed. Morton first used
white pepper seed, which he discarded later for No. 8 shot, while
Volkoff employed water. Modifications in the use of these three
media—seeds, shot, and water—are still employed by craniologists.
The most noteworthy names among the earlier workers in craniology are
those of Retzius and Grattan. Anders Retzius (1796-1860) correlated the
schemes of Blumenbach and Camper, and so arrived at the methods of
craniological measurements which are almost universally in use at the
present day.
[Sidenote: =Cephalic Index of Retzius.=]
In 1840 he introduced his theory regarding cranial shapes to the Academy
of Science at Stockholm, and two years later gave a course of lectures
on the same subject. He criticised the results attained by Blumenbach,
showing that his group contains varying types of skull form; and he
invented the cephalic index, or length-breadth index—_i.e._, the ratio
of the breadth of a skull to its length, expressed as a per-centage. The
narrower skulls he termed dolichocephalic, the broader ones
brachycephalic. By this method Retzius designed rather to arrange the
forms of crania than to classify thereby the races of mankind, though he
tried to group the European peoples more or less according to their
head-form. While thus elaborating the suggestion of Blumenbach, he also
recorded the degree of the projection of the jaws, demonstrated by
Camper, and he added the measurements of the face, height, and jugular
breadth. Thus was Craniology established on its present lines.
[Sidenote: =Grattan.=]
John Grattan (1800-1871), the Belfast apothecary, has never received the
recognition that was his due. Having undertaken to describe the numerous
ancient Irish skulls collected by his friend Edmund Getty, he soon
became impressed by the absence of
that uniformity of method and that numerical precision without
which no scientific investigation requiring the co-operation of
numerous observers can be successfully prosecuted. The mode of
procedure hitherto adopted furnishes to the mind nothing but
vague generalities ... until we can record with something
approaching towards accuracy the proportional development of the
great subdivisions of the brain, as indicated by its bony
covering, and by our figures convey to the mind determinate
ideas of the relation they bear towards each other, we shall not
be in a position to do justice to our materials.... No single
cranium can _per se_ be taken to represent the true average
characteristics of the variety from which it may be derived. It
is only from a large deduction that the ethnologist can venture
to pronounce with confidence upon the normal type of any
race.[21]
Footnote 21:
J. Grattan, _Ulster Journal of Arch._, 1858.
Grattan devised a series of radial measurements from the _meatus
auditorius_, and constructed an ingenious craniometer. As Professor J.
Symington points out, “Grattan’s work was almost cotemporaneous with
that of Anders Retzius, and nearly all of it was done before the German
and French Schools had elaborated their schemes of skull
measurements.”[22] He adopted the most useful of the measurements then
existing, and added new ones of his own devising.
Footnote 22:
_Proc. Belfast Nat. Hist. and Phil. Soc._, 1903-4; and _Journ. Anat.
and Phys._
The distinguished American physician and physiologist Dr. J. Aitken
Meigs laid down the principles that “Cranial measurements to be of
practical use should be both absolute and relative. Absolute
measurements are necessary to demonstrate those anatomical differences
between the crania of different races which assume a great zoological
significance in proportion to their constancy. By relative measurements
of the head we obtain an approximate idea of the peculiar physiological
character of the enclosed brain ... the craniographer, in fact, becomes
the cranioscopist” (1861, p. 857). In this paper Meigs gives
craniometrical directions, some of which were designed to give
measurements for portions of the brain.
[Sidenote: =Broca.=]
In France the greatest names are those of Broca, Topinard, and de
Quatrefages. Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880) was first destined for the
army, but when the death of his sister left him the only child he was
unwilling to leave his parents, and resolved to study medicine and share
the work of his father, an eminent physician. He soon distinguished
himself, especially in surgery, not only in practical work, but also in
his writings. With regard to the latter, Dr. Pozzi, in a memoir, says of
him: “There is hardly one of the subjects in which he did not at the
first stroke make a discovery, great or small; there is not one on which
he has not left the mark of his originality.”[23]
Footnote 23:
_J.A.I._, x., 1881, p. 243.
[Illustration:
PAUL BROCA.
]
In 1847 he was appointed to serve on a Commission to report on some
excavations in the cemetery of the Celestins, and this led him to study
craniology, and thence to ethnology, in which his interest, once
aroused, never flagged. The story of the formation of the _Société
d’anthropologie de Paris_ (1859) and of _l’École_ _d’anthropologie_
(1876), of both of which Broca was the moving spirit, affords a curious
commentary on the suspicion in which Anthropology was held. To the
success of the School he devoted all his energies, and during many years
of anxiety he met and overcame all obstacles, surmounted all
difficulties, wore down all opposition, and finally placed it in a
secure position. He invented several instruments for the more accurate
study of craniology, such as the occipital crochet, goniometer, and
stereograph, and also standardised methods; but, dissatisfied with the
inconclusiveness of mere cranial comparisons, he turned towards the end
of his life to the study of the brain. He was an indefatigable worker,
and his sudden death in his fifty-sixth year is attributed to cerebral
exhaustion.
“Broca was a man,” said Dr. Beddoe, “who positively radiated science and
the love of science; no one could associate with him without catching a
portion of the sacred flame. Topinard has been the Elisha of this
Elijah.”[24]
Footnote 24:
Anniversary Address, Anth. Inst., 1891.
[Sidenote: =Topinard.=]
Paul Topinard, pupil, colleague, and friend of Broca, made valuable
investigations on the living population of France, besides devoting much
time to anthropometrical studies; but his greatest service has been the
preparation and publication of _l’Anthropologie_ (1876), a guide for
students and a manual of reference for travellers and others, voicing
the idea of Broca and his school, and “elucidating in a single volume a
series of vast dimensions, in process of rapid development.” In 1885 he
published his classic _Eléments d’anthropologie générale_,[25] which
aimed at creating a new atmosphere for the science, breaking free from
the traditions of the monogenists and polygenists, and incorporating the
new ideas spread by Darwin and Haeckel.
Footnote 25:
General Anthropology, according to Topinard’s classification, is
concerned merely with man as an animal, and deals with anatomy and
physiology, pathology, and psychology.
[Sidenote: =De Quatrefages.=]
Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810-92) was not only a distinguished
zoologist, occupying himself mainly with certain groups of marine
animals, but also Professor of Anthropology at the Paris Museum of
Natural History, and undertook several voyages along the coasts of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic in search of information. In 1867 he
published _Rapport sur le progrès de l’Anthropologie_, “which reduces to
a complete and intelligible system the abstruse and difficult, and, to
many, the incomprehensible science of anthropology, embracing during his
investigations a wide range of topics, and arranging disjointed facts in
due order, so as at once to evince their bearing upon the subject.”[26]
He published many other works, among them _Les Pygmées_ (1887),
_L’espèce humaine_ (1877), _Histoire générale des races humaines_
(1889), and, together with E. T. Hamy, the famous _Crania ethnica_
(1875-79). Professor F. Starr, in the preface to his translation of _The
Pygmies_ (1895), says:—
Footnote 26:
_Anth. Rev._, 1869, p. 231.
A man of strong convictions and very conservative, de
Quatrefages was ever ready to hear the other side, and ever
candid and kindly in argument. He was one of the first to
support the Society of Anthropology. Those who know the story of
the early days of that great association understand what that
means. When the claim for man’s antiquity was generally derided,
de Quatrefages championed the cause. A monogenist [p. 53], a
believer in the extreme antiquity of our race, he was never won
over by any of the proposed theories of evolution.... To the
very end of a long life our author lived happily and busily
active among his books and specimens.
[Sidenote: =Virchow.=]
In Germany the greatest name is that of Virchow. Rudolf Ludwig Karl
Virchow (1821-1902) had already gained fame in the medical world,
especially with regard to histology, pathology, and the study of
epidemics, and was the prime leader in the “_Medizinische Reform_”
movement before he began his valuable contributions to the science of
Anthropology.
His first anthropological writings were some papers on cretinism (1851
and 1852), and from this date onwards his services to the science can
scarcely be over-estimated. Much of his energy was also given to somatic
anthropology, and in 1866 he started his investigations into prehistoric
archæology, combining scientific method with spade-work.
In a notice of his work by Oscar Israel[27] (p. 656) we read:—
Footnote 27:
Smithsonian Report, 1902. Translated from the _Deutsche Rundschau_ of
Dec., 1902.
Virchow devoted himself to ethnographic studies no less than to
other branches of anthropology, and here he became a center to
which the material streamed from all sides, and from which went
forth suggestion, criticism, and energetic assistance. This
never-idle man did not disdain to teach travelers schooled in
other lines of investigation the anthropometric methods; and,
indeed, he found time for everything, and never left a piece of
work to others that he could possibly do himself. Thus, for
example, for ten years following its inception by him in 1876,
he worked up alone the data recorded in German schools as to the
color of the eyes, the hair, and the skin which has proved of
such value for the knowledge of the different branches of the
German race.
[Sidenote: =Sergi.=]
Professor Sergi at one time proposed to banish measurements from
craniology, and to rely solely on observational methods. He has later
modified his extreme position, while, as a result of his crusade, he has
induced most anthropologists to pay more attention to the configuration
of the skull, and some of his descriptive terms have come into common
use.
[Sidenote: =Hagen’s Criticism of Craniometry.=]
Dr. Hagen relates the extreme specialisation into which craniologists
were led:—
A rage for skull measurements, vast, vigorous, and heedless, set
in on all sides, especially after Lucae had discovered and
perfected a method of accurately representing the irregular form
of the object studied. “More skulls” was henceforth the war-cry;
the trunk, extremities, soft tissues, skin and hair, might all
go by the board, being counted of no scientific value whatever.
Anthropologists, or those who aspired to the title, measured and
delineated skulls; museums became veritable cities of skulls,
and the reputation of a scientific traveller almost stood or
fell with the number of crania which he brought back with him.
After two decades of measuring and collecting ever greater
quantities of material from foreign lands, and from the
so-called primitive or aboriginal races, the inadequacy of
Retzius’s method became apparent. Far too many intermediate
forms were met with, which it was found absolutely impossible to
classify by its means. In accordance with the suggestion of the
French anthropologist Broca, and of Welcker, Professor of
Anatomy at Halle, a third type, the so-called Mesocephalic form,
was interposed between the two forms recognised by Retzius. Even
this did not suffice, however. In the face of the infinite
variety of form of the crania now massed together, a variety
only comparable to that of leaves in a forest, this primitively
simple scheme, with its four and finally six types, failed
through lack of elasticity. Then began complication extending
ever further and further. Attention was no longer confined to
the length and breadth, but also to the height of the cranium,
high and low (or flat) skulls—_i.e._, hypsicephalic and
chamaecephalic varieties being recognised. The facial part of
the skull was examined not only from the side, with a view to
recording the straightness or obliquity of the profile, but also
from the front; and there were thus distinguished long, medium,
and short faces, and also broad and narrow facial types. The
nasal skeleton, the palate, the orbit, the teeth, and the
mandible were investigated in turn, and at last all the
individual bones of the cranium and face, their irregularities
of outline, and their relations to one another, were subjected
to the closest examination and most subtle measurements, with
instruments of extreme delicacy of construction and ingenuity of
design, till, finally, the trifling number of five thousand
measurements for every skull found an advocate in the person of
the Hungarian Professor V. Török (whereby the wealth of detail
obscured the main objects of study); while, on the other hand,
observers deviated into scientific jugglery, like that of the
Italian Professor Sergi, who contrived to recognise within the
limits of a single small archipelago, the D’Entrecasteaux group
of islets near New Guinea, as many as eleven cranial varieties,
which were all distinguished by high-sounding descriptive names,
such as _Lophocephalus brachyclitometopus_, etc.
[Sidenote: =Macalister’s Criticism of Craniometry.=]
The misuse of Craniometry is also described by Professor Alexander
Macalister[28]:—
Footnote 28:
Presidential Address to Section H., Brit. Ass., 1892.
Despite all the labour that has been bestowed on the subject,
craniometric literature is at present as unsatisfactory as it
is dull. Hitherto observations have been concentrated on
cranial measurements as methods for the discrimination of the
skulls of different races. Scores of lines, arcs, chords, and
indexes have been devised for this purpose, and the diagnosis
of skulls has been attempted by a process as mechanical as
that whereby we identify certain issues of postage-stamps by
counting the nicks in the margin. But there is underlying all
these no unifying hypothesis; so that when we, in our
sesquipedalian jargon, describe an Australian skull as
microcephalic, phænozygous, tapeino-dolichocephalic,
prognathic, platyrhine, hypselopalatine, leptostaphyline,
dolichuranic, chamaeprosopic, and microseme, we are no nearer
to the formulation of any philosophic concept of the general
principles which have led to the assumption of these
characters by the cranium in question, and we are forced to
echo the apostrophe of Von Török, “Vanity, thy name is
Craniology.”
It is significant that so many of the earlier craniologists recognised
that the really important problem before them was to gain a knowledge of
the size and relative proportions of the various regions of the brain,
this being a direct result of the phrenological studies then so much in
vogue. When phrenology became discredited, this aspect of craniometry
was largely neglected; but recently it has exhibited signs of a healthy
revival, and the inner surface of the cranium is now regarded as more
instructive than the outer.
Though for a time craniology was hailed as the magic formula by which
alone all ethnological tangles could be unravelled, measurements of
other parts of the body were not ignored by those who recognised that no
one measurement was sufficient to determine racial affinities.
[Sidenote: =Anthropometry.=]
Thus Anthropometry began to map out definite lines of research, and
detailed studies were made of arms and legs, hands and feet, curves and
angles, brains and viscera; while, shorn of its extravagant claims,
craniology took its legitimate place as one in a series of bodily
measurements. One of the earliest workers in measurements other than
that of the skull was Charles White (1728-1813).
His contribution to Somatology was a series of measurements on arms; and
he discovered that the fore-arm of the Negro is longer, in comparison
with his upper-arm, than that of the European, and that that of the Ape
is relatively longer than that of the Negro. On account of these
measurements on the living (no less than fifty Negroes were measured),
White has been claimed as the founder of Anthropometry. Soemmerring
(1755-1830), however, had made use of measurements in his comparison of
the anatomy of the Negro with the European.
[Sidenote: =Measurements and Observations of Living Populations.=]
About the middle of the nineteenth century observations on the living
were made, in addition to Anthropometry; investigations were undertaken,
not of the skulls and bones of the dead, or even of the head-forms and
body-measurements of the living, but of the forms of such features as
the nose and ear, pigmentation of the skin and eyes, and the like. As
early as 1834 L. R. Villermé had started investigations on the various
classes of the population of Great Britain, comparing the dwellers in
the country with those of manufacturing districts and large cities,
mainly in the interests of hygiene; and later he examined the size and
health of children working in coal-mines.
In 1861 the venerated Dr. John Beddoe published a study of hair and eye
colour in Ireland, and he has continued his researches in this fruitful
field from time to time in various parts of the British Isles, and to a
less extent on the continent of Europe.
But it was on the continent that this method of investigation was most
ardently prosecuted; and the story of its political origin may here be
briefly recounted, since the results were of great service to the
science of Anthropometry.
During the bombardment of Paris, in the Franco-Prussian War, the Natural
History Museum suffered some damage through shells; and soon afterwards
the director, de Quatrefages, published a pamphlet on _La Race
Prussienne_ (1871). This was to show that the Prussians were not
Teutonic at all, but were descended from the Finns, who were classed
with the Lapps as alien Mongolian intruders into Europe. They were thus
mere barbarians, with a hatred of a culture they could not appreciate;
and their object in shelling the museum was “to take from this Paris
that they execrate, from this Babylon that they curse, one of its
elements of superiority and attraction. Hence our collections were
doomed to perish.” A reply was made by Professor Virchow, of Berlin, and
the battle raged furiously. The significance of this controversy to
Anthropometry lies in the fact that its immediate result was an order
from the German Government authorising an official census of the colour
of the hair and eyes of 6,000,000 school children of the Empire—a census
which served at once as a stimulus to and a model for further
investigators.
This census had some amusing and unexpected results, quoted by Dr.
Tylor[29] as illustrating the growth of legends:—
Footnote 29:
Pres. Add. Brit. Ass., 1879.
No doubt many legends of the ancient world, though not really
history, are myths which have arisen by reasoning on actual
events, as definite as that which, some four years ago, was
terrifying the peasant mind in North Germany, and especially in
Posen. The report had spread far and wide that all Catholic
children with black hair and blue eyes were to be sent out of
the country, some said to Russia; while others declared that it
was the King of Prussia who had been playing cards with the
Sultan of Turkey, and had staked and lost 40,000 fair-haired,
blue-eyed children; and there were Moors travelling about in
covered carts to collect them; and the schoolmasters were
helping, for they were to have five dollars for every child they
handed over. For a time popular excitement was quite serious;
the parents kept their children away from school and hid them,
and when they appeared in the streets of the market town the
little ones clung to them with terrified looks.... One
schoolmaster, who evidently knew his people, assured the
terrified parents that it was only the children with blue hair
and green eyes that were wanted—an explanation that sent them
home quite comforted.
Observations of external characters, combined with precise measurements,
have now been made on a large scale in most European countries, and
these methods are adopted on anthropological expeditions. In this way a
great deal of valuable material for study has been accumulated, but much
work remains to be done in this direction.
[Sidenote: =Methods of Dealing with Anthropometric Data.=]
Not only have head, body, and limb measurements been recorded, but the
device of an “index” has been adopted which gives the ratio between two
measurements, as, for example, in the previously-mentioned cephalic
index (p. 34). The averages or means of series of indices obtained from
one people have been compared with those obtained from other peoples;
but this method is misleading, as there is frequently a very
considerable range in any given series, and a mean merely gives a
colourless conception of racial types, the only value of which is a
ready standard of comparison, which, however, is full of pitfalls.
A further step in the advancement of anthropometric research was made
when the extent and frequency of such deviations from the mean were
recorded. At first this was done in a tabular manner by means of
seriations; then curves were employed: a single peak was held to
indicate purity of race, double peaks that two racial elements entered
into the series measured, a broad peak or plateau was interpreted as
being due to race fusion. Dr. C. S. Myers,[30] who has discussed these
and other methods, points out the fallacies of this interpretation,
saying: “There can be little doubt that most of the many-peaked curves
owe their irregularity to the inadequate number of individual
measurements which have been taken.”
Footnote 30:
C. S. Myers, “The Future of Anthropometry,” _Journ. Anth. Inst._,
xxxiii., 1903, p. 36.
Dr. Myers emphatically states:—
If physical anthropology is to be a science, its results _must_
be capable of expression in mathematical formulæ. To this end
some of the most interesting of biological work of the age is
tending ... generally speaking, the study of living forms is
passing from the descriptive to the quantitative aspect, and it
is by experiment and observation on biometrical lines that
future progress is clearly promised.... Thanks to the recent
work of Professor Karl Pearson, the proper start has at last
been made.
His school is now attacking by statistical methods the problem of the
dependence of the variation of one character upon that of another. It
should be remembered that Quetelet was the first to apply the Gaussian
Law of Error to human measurements in its elementary binomial form; in
this he was followed by Sir Francis Galton, who was the first in this
country to realise the importance of applying mathematical methods to
anthropological measurements and observations. An interesting account of
the genesis of his work in this direction is given in his _Memories of
My Life_ (1908). Similar work has also been undertaken by German
investigators.
[Sidenote: =Scientific and Practical Value of Anthropometry.=]
We may conclude this chapter with a brief summary of the main lines
which investigations are now taking; but it is impossible to mention
even the more important of recent workers in this vast field.
From the beginning of the study, anthropometry was employed as a precise
means of expressing the differences between man and the lower animals;
and, owing to improved methods of research and the discovery of new
material, the origin and differentiation of man is still investigated
with assiduity.
Though no one measurement can be used for purposes of race
discrimination, yet a series of measurements on a sufficiently large
group of subjects, together with observations on the colour of the skin,
hair, and eyes, the form of various organs—such as the nose and ears—and
other comparisons of a similar nature, are invaluable in the study of
the races of mankind. It is only in this way that the mixtures of the
population can be sorted out, their origins traced, and some idea gained
of the racial migrations which have taken place since man first
appeared.
Through the initiative of Sir Francis Galton, as Dr. Myers points out,
anthropometry has begun to investigate other problems which must
ultimately be of ethnological interest; and he has opened out the whole
subject of heredity, which eventually must enter into every branch of
physical anthropology. The followers of Mendel are at present laying a
foundation upon their experiments with plants and animals. At present
very little attention has been paid by them to man; nor, probably, can
much be attempted until more precise data are available.
Lamentably little is known with accuracy about the physical and
psychical effects of the mixture of different human types, and it is yet
to be determined how far the admitted unsatisfactory character of many
half-caste populations is due to physiological or sociological causes.
There is a great dearth of sufficiently numerous and reliable
observations and statistics concerning the effect of the environment
upon small or large groups of human beings—a problem to which Professor
Ridgeway devoted his last presidential address to the Royal
Anthropological Institute (1910).
It is often important that the physical fitness of people should be
tested, in order to see how they stand in relation to other people, and
to discover any physical imperfections. Especially is this desirable in
the case of children; and the government inspection of school children,
though inadequate, is a step in the right direction. By such means early
inclinations to various defects are discovered and prevented, and
valuable statistics are obtained which can not only be utilised for
comparative purposes, but may form a basis for future legislation. It is
also a matter of importance to determine whether certain imperfections
are due to diseased, abnormal, or other undesirable factors in their
parentage; or whether they are the results of unfavourable subsequent
conditions. But in order that comparisons can be made, it is necessary
to make similar investigations on the normal, capable, and healthy
population.
Another branch of investigation was undertaken mainly for the
identification of criminals, and consisted in certain measurements
selected by M. Alphonse Bertillon, supplemented by photographs and a
record of individual peculiarities. The practical value of this method
of identification in France was demonstrated by its immediate results.
Criminals began to leave off aliases, and numbers of them flocked to
England. Finger-prints as a means of identification were first
discovered by Purkenje, the Breslau physiologist (1823), who utilised
them for classification. Sir William Herschel, of the Indian Civil
Service, adopted the method in Bengal, and now methods introduced by Sir
Francis Galton are in use in India, England, and elsewhere, having in
most cases supplanted the Bertillon system.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES
NEXT to geographical discovery, perhaps the most stimulating influence
on Anthropology has been the succession of controversies in which it has
constantly been involved. It has always been regarded as a somewhat
anarchical subject, advocating views which might prove dangerous to
Church and State; and many are the battles which have raged within and
without. Huxley attributed the large audiences which were wont to throng
the Anthropological Section of the British Association to the innate
bellicose instincts of man, and to the splendid opportunities afforded
by Anthropology for indulging those propensities.[31]
Footnote 31:
Add. Brit. Ass., Dublin, 1878.
The discussions of the earlier centuries were focussed round the
question of the origin of man, and from this highly debateable problem
arose the two antagonistic groups of the monogenists, or orthodox
school, deriving all mankind from a single pair, and the polygenists,
who believed in a multiple origin. Before the discoveries of prehistoric
archæology had advanced sufficiently to show the futility of such
discussion, anthropologists were split up into opposing camps by the
question of the fixity of species, and became embroiled in one of the
fiercest controversies of modern times—that of evolution. A subordinate
subject of contention, implicated in the polygenist doctrines, was the
place of the Negro in nature, involving the question of slavery.
[Sidenote: =Origin of Man.=]
Among the ancient philosophers the question of the origin of man was
answered in various ways; some, like Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle,
believed that mankind had always existed, because there never could have
been a beginning of things, relying on the scholastic argument that no
bird could be born without an egg, and no egg without a bird. Epicurus
and Lucretius believed in a “fortuitous cause,” a preparation of fat and
slimy earth, with a long incubation of water and conjunction of heavenly
and planetary bodies. Others, that men and animals “crawled out of the
earth by chance,” “like mushrooms or blite.”
With the spread of Christianity the Mosaic cosmogony became generally
adopted, and monogenism developed into an article of faith. The Church
fulminated against those atheists who admitted doubts on the subject of
Adam and Eve, or believed in the existence of antipodal man, or that man
had existed for more than the 6,000 years allotted to him by Scripture.
If the censure of the Church did not lead to recantation, the heretic
was burnt. A seventeenth-century divine, Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Cambridge, was even more precise than Archbishop
Ussher: he reached the conclusion that “man was created by the Trinity
on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o’clock in the morning.”[32]
Footnote 32:
Clodd, _Pioneers of Evolution_, quoting from White, _Warfare of
Science with Theology_.
The discovery of the New World dealt a severe blow to the authority of
the Fathers on matters of science. Antipodal man, whom St. Augustine[33]
had extinguished as “excessively absurd,” was found to exist, and the
Spaniards forthwith excused their barbarities to the American natives on
the plea that they were not the descendants of Adam and Eve.
Footnote 33:
_De Civitate Dei._
[Sidenote: =Polygenism and Monogenism.=]
Henceforward the polygenists began to gain ground. Theophrastus
Paracelsus (1520) first asserted the plurality of the races of mankind,
and explained the Mosaic cosmogony as having been written
“theologically—for the weaker brethren.” Vanini (1616) mentions a
belief, entertained by atheists, that man was descended from or allied
to monkeys. In 1655 Isaac de la Peyrère, a Calvinist scholar of
Bordeaux, published in Amsterdam his _Præ-Adamitæ_, to prove that Adam
and Eve were not the first human beings upon the earth; and his work,
being prohibited by authority, became immensely popular.
His theory, though unorthodox, was founded on Scripture, and regarded
Adam and Eve as merely a special and much later creation; the Gentiles,
who peopled the rest of the earth, having been formed from the dust of
the earth, together with the beasts of the field, on the sixth day. The
inhabitants of the New World, which, being separate from the Old, could
not have been peopled with the same race, were of Gentile origin. This
theory was bitterly opposed. The _Parlement_ of Paris caused the book to
be publicly burned. The Inquisition laid hands on the author, and he was
forced to abjure both his Pre-Adamite heresy and his Calvinism. He died
in a convent in 1676.
The writings of the Encyclopedists, the freedom of thought claimed by
Voltaire and Rousseau, together with the classification of species by
Linnæus, emboldened the polygenists. Lord Kames[34] was one of the
earliest exponents in England, and he soon found many followers. Two
separate lines of antagonism may be distinguished in the controversy. In
one—the Anglo-French—Prichard, Cuvier, and de Quatrefages represent the
monogenists, and Virey and Bory de Saint-Vincent the polygenists; the
other, in which America and the slavery question were implicated,
polygenists and anti-abolitionists going hand-in-hand, was represented
by Nott and Gliddon in America, Knox and Hunt in England, and Broca in
France.
Footnote 34:
_Sketches on the History of Man_, 1774.
When materials began to accumulate they were detrimental to the
polygenist theory. Especially was this the case with regard to the proof
of what Broca termed “_eugenesis_”—_i.e._, that all the _Hominidæ_ are,
and always have been, fertile with each other. This, which formed a test
between species and varieties in Botany and Zoology, was claimed also in
Anthropology, and the polygenists had to seek for support elsewhere.
They found it in Linguistics; “language as a test of race” bulked large
in ethnological controversy, and is not yet entirely extinct.
At first the monogenists claimed language as supporting their views. All
languages were to be traced to three sources—Indo-European, Semitic, and
Malay; and these, in their turn, were the offspring of a parent tongue,
now entirely lost. But it was soon found impossible to reconcile even
Aryan and Semitic, and a common parent for all three languages was
inconceivable. The linguistic argument then passed over to the
polygenists.
Hovelacque stated that “the ascertained impossibility of reducing a
multiplicity of linguistic families to a common centre is for us
sufficient proof of the original plurality of the races that have been
developed with them.” M. Chavée[35] went further. “We might,” he says,
“put Semitic children and Indo-European children apart, who had been
taught by deaf mutes, and we should find that the former would naturally
speak a Semitic language, the latter an Aryan language.” F. Müller and
others took up this line of argument, holding that distinct stock
languages proved the existence of distinct stock races. But, as
Professor Keane points out, in his summary of the controversy (1896,
chap. vii.), _quod nimis probat, nihil probat_—what proves too much,
proves nothing—and the hundred or more stock languages in America alone,
reduced the argument to an absurdity.
Footnote 35:
See Topinard, 1878, p. 424.
[Sidenote: =Monogenists.=]
Among the monogenists may be included most of the older
anthropologists—Linnæus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Camper, Prichard, and
Lawrence. Since they held that all mankind was descended from a single
pair (the question as to whether this pair were white, black, or red,
occasioned a further discussion), they had to account for the subsequent
divergence producing the present clearly-recognised varieties; and, in
so doing, anticipated the theory of evolution, which was not clearly
enunciated until the time of Lamarck.
Linnæus believed in fixity of species, but had doubts about the Biblical
account. As a naturalist, he found it difficult to credit the
exceptional nature of a country which had supplied the wants of
zoological species as opposed to one another as the polar bear and the
tropical hippopotamus. Buffon ascribed the variations of man to the
influence of climate and diet. Though Prichard and Lawrence both denied
the possibility of the transmission of acquired characters, Prichard
believed that the transmission of occasional variations might, to some
extent, account for the diversities of races.[36] Lawrence wrote more
clearly: “Racial differences can be explained only by two
principles—namely, the occasional production of an offspring with
different characters from those of the parents, as a native or
congenital variety; and the propagation of such varieties by
generation.” He considered that domestication favoured the production of
these congenital and transmissible variations, and, anticipating the
Eugenic school, deplored the fact that, while so much care and attention
was paid to the breeding of domestic animals, the breeding of man was
left to the vagaries of his own individual fancy.
Footnote 36:
In an essay entitled “A Remarkable Anticipation of Modern Views on
Evolution,” Professor E. B. Poulton draws attention to the ideas
expressed in the first and second editions of the _Researches_, by
Prichard, “one of the most remarkable and clear-sighted of the
predecessors of Darwin and Wallace.... It is an anomaly that such
works as the _Vestiges_ should attract attention, while Prichard’s
keen insight, sound judgment, and balanced reasoning on many aspects
of organic evolution, and especially on the scope of heredity, should
remain unknown.” _Essays on Evolution_, 1908, pp. 192, 175.
[Sidenote: =Lawrence.=]
Sir William Lawrence (1783-1867) was appointed Professor of Anatomy and
Surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons at the early age of thirty-two.
His lectures on “Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the
Natural History of Man,” delivered between 1816 and 1818, raised an
immediate outcry; and the author (to use his own words) was charged
“with the unworthy design of propagating opinions detrimental to
society, and of endeavouring to enforce them for the purpose of
loosening those restraints in which the welfare of mankind exists.”
Lawrence was forced to bow before the storm of abuse, and announce
publicly that the volumes had been suppressed, as he was refused
copyright. It is interesting to note that these lectures are among those
at present recommended for the use of students of Anthropology.
Lawrence was far in advance of his time, and much of his teaching may be
said to have anticipated the doctrine of evolution. Unfortunately, the
theological protest raised by his lectures—published when he was only
thirty-five—resulted in his forsaking Anthropology altogether, and he
henceforward devoted himself entirely to anatomy and surgery.
[Sidenote: =Lord Monboddo.=]
Another prophet in advance of his times was Lord Monboddo. James Burnett
Monboddo (1714-1799) was regarded as one of the most eccentric
characters of the eighteenth century, mainly on account of his peculiar
views about the origin of society and of language, and his theories as
to the relationship of man with the monkeys. He was deeply interested in
all the current accounts of “tailed men,” thus justifying Dr. Johnson’s
remark that he was “as jealous of his tail as a squirrel.” Later
students of his writings are less struck by these eccentricities, which
afforded endless jests to the wags of the age, than by his scientific
methods of investigation and his acute conclusions. He not only studied
man as one of the animals, but he also studied savages with a view to
elucidating the origin of civilisation.
Many other pre-Darwinian evolutionists might be mentioned, but Professor
Lovejoy’s caution must be noted:—
The premature adoption of a hypothesis is a sin against the
scientific spirit; and the chance acceptance by some enthusiast
of a truth in which, at the time, he has no sound reason for
believing, by no means entitles him to any place of honour in
the history of science.[37]
Footnote 37:
_Pop. Sci. Monthly_, 1909, p. 499.
The first to enunciate a coherent theory of evolution—that of
Transformism or Transmutation—was Lamarck.[38]
Footnote 38:
De Maillet and Robinet had already outlined part of the Lamarckian
doctrine.
[Sidenote: =Lamarck.=]
Lamarck (1744-1829) believed that species were not fixed, but that the
more complex were developed from pre-existent simpler forms. He
attributed the change of species mainly to physical conditions of life,
to crossing, and especially to use or disuse of organs, which not only
resulted in the modification, growth, or atrophy of some, but, under the
stress of necessity, led to the formation of new ones. “_La fonction
fait l’organe._” He also held that changes produced in the individual as
the result of environment were transmitted to the offspring. Organic
life was traced back and back to a small number of primordial germs or
monads, the offspring of spontaneous generation. Man formed no
exception. He was the result of the slow transformation of certain apes.
Lamarck’s views were first published in 1801, and were enlarged in his
_Philosophie Zoologique_, 1809.
[Sidenote: =Cuvier.=]
Lamarck’s chief opponent was Cuvier (1769-1832), Professor of Natural
History and of Comparative Anatomy in Paris, who, besides being the
recognised authority on zoology (his great book, _Le Règne Animal_, was
long the standard work on the subject), was even more renowned as an
anatomist. He upheld the theory of Catastrophe, of alternate
destructions and regenerations, against the new theories of Transformism
and Evolution.
According to this widely accepted belief, the universe was subject to
violent terrestrial revolutions, involving the destruction of all
existing things and the total annihilation of all living beings
belonging to the past epoch.
The theory was by no means new; it was current in the East in the
thirteenth century. In a book written by Mohamed Kaswini on the wonders
of nature, he tells the following tale:—
In passing one day by a very ancient and extremely populous
city, I asked of one of the inhabitants who founded their city.
He replied to me: “I know not, and our ancestors knew no more
than we do on this point.” Five hundred years afterwards,
passing by the same place, I could not perceive a trace of the
city. Inquiring of one of the peasants about the place when it
was that the city was destroyed, he answered me: “What an odd
question you put to me; this country has never been otherwise
than as you see it now.” I returned there after another five
hundred years, and I found in the place of the country I had
seen—a sea. I now asked of the fishermen how long it was since
their country became a sea; and he replied that a person like me
ought to know that it had always been a sea. I returned again
after five hundred years; the sea had disappeared, and it was
now dry land. No one knew what had become of the sea, or if such
a thing had ever existed. Finally, I returned once more after
five hundred years, and I again found a flourishing city. The
people told me that the origin of their city was lost in the
night of time.[39]
Footnote 39:
Quoted from R. Knox, _Anth. Rev._, i., 1863, p. 263.
Cuvier’s position was supported by the evidence brought to France by
Napoleon’s scientific expedition to Egypt (1801). Here were seen numbers
of mummified animals, probably dating back some three to four thousand
years, but showing no appreciable difference from existing types. This
was held to demolish the theory of evolution by proving the immutability
of species.
[Sidenote: =Étienne Saint-Hilaire.=]
Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), the zoologist on the
Egyptian expedition, interpreted the results differently, and was one of
the most brilliant supporters of Lamarck. In 1828 he published his
convictions that the same forms have not been perpetuated since the
origin of all things, though he did not believe that existing species
were undergoing modification. Cuvier returned to the charge, and in 1856
propounded his doctrine of the periodical revolutions of the earth, of
the renewal each time of the flora and fauna, and of the incessant and
miraculous intervention of a creative Will. And for a time, owing to his
position and authority, he held the field.
[Sidenote: =Robert Chambers.=]
In 1844 appeared a book which had an enormous influence on the
pre-Darwinian history of Evolution. This was an anonymous work entitled
_Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation_, the authorship of which
was not revealed until the publication of the twelfth edition in 1884.
It was the production of Robert Chambers (1802-1871), co-editor with his
brother William of _Chambers’s Journal_, and author of many books on
Scotland and a few on science. He traced the action of general laws
throughout the universe as a system of growth and development, and held
that the various species of animals and plants had been produced in
orderly succession from each other by the action of unknown laws and the
influence of external conditions. The _Vestiges_ became at once the
centre of scientific discussion, denounced by the orthodox, and held
“not proven” by most of the men of science of the time. Its supporters
were called “Vestigiarian,” a term which implied also “unscientific,”
“sentimental,” and “absurd.”
The curious point is that in the _Vestiges_ we find much of what was
subsequently called the Darwinian theory already enunciated. According
to Wallace, it clearly formulated the conception of evolution through
natural laws, and yet it was denounced by those who soon after were to
become the champions of Darwinism. This was partly due to the way in
which the doctrine was treated and expressed, partly also to the
“needless savagery” of Professor Huxley.
Huxley wrote in 1887: “I must have read the _Vestiges_ ... before 1846;
but, if I did, the book made very little impression on me.... I confess
the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly
unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer.” Professor
Lovejoy[40] explains the reasons for Huxley’s attitude:—
Footnote 40:
_Loc. cit._
The truth is that Huxley’s strongly emotional and highly
pugnacious nature was held back by certain wholly non-logical
influences from accepting an hypothesis for which the evidence
was practically as potent for over a decade before he accepted
it as it was at the time of his conversion. The book was written
in a somewhat exuberant and rhetorical style. With all its
religious heterodoxy, it was characterised by a certain pious
and edifying tone, and was given to abrupt transitions from
scientific reasoning to mystical sentiment. It contained
numerous blunders in matters of biological and geological
detail; and its author inclined to believe, on the basis of some
rather absurd experimental evidence, in the possibility of
spontaneous generation. All these things were offensive to the
professional standards of an enthusiastic young naturalist,
scrupulous about the rigour of the game, intolerant of vagueness
and of any mixture of the romantic imagination with scientific
inquiry.... He therefore, in 1854, almost outdid the _Edinburgh
Review_ in the ferocity of his onslaught upon the layman who had
ventured to put forward sweeping generalisations upon biological
questions while capable of errors upon particular points which
were palpable to every competent specialist.
Huxley refers to this review as “the only review I ever have had qualms
of conscience about, on the grounds of needless savagery.” Darwin more
mildly described it as “rather hard on the poor author.” Indeed, he
confessed to a certain sympathy with the _Vestiges_; while Wallace, in
1845, expressed a very favourable opinion of the book, describing it as
“an ingenious hypothesis, strongly supported by some striking facts and
analogies.”
The strongest testimony to the value of Chambers’s work is that of Mr.
A. W. Benn, who writes in _Modern England_, 1908, concerning the
_Vestiges_:—
Hardly any advance has since been made on Chambers’s general
arguments, which at the time they appeared would have been
accepted as convincing, but for theological truculence and
scientific timidity. And Chambers himself only gave unity to
thoughts already in wide circulation.... Chambers was not a
scientific expert, nor altogether an original thinker; but he
had studied scientific literature to better purpose than any
professor.... The considerations that now recommend evolution to
popular audiences are no other than those urged in the
_Vestiges_.
[Sidenote: =Herbert Spencer.=]
The next great name among the pre-Darwinian evolutionists is that of
Herbert Spencer. About 1850 he wrote:—
The belief in organic evolution had taken deep root (in my
mind), and drawn to itself a large amount of evidence—evidence
not derived from numerous special instances, but derived from
the general aspects of organic nature and from the necessity of
accepting the hypothesis of evolution when the hypothesis of
special creation had been rejected. The special creation belief
had dropped out of my mind many years before, and I could not
remain in a suspended state: acceptance of the only possible
alternative was imperative.[41]
Footnote 41:
Duncan, _Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer_, 1898, II., 317.
This suspended state, the _tätige Skepsis_ of Goethe, was just what
Huxley was enjoying; in his own words, “Reversing the apostolic precept
to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of
received doctrines, when I had to do with the transmutationists; and
stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox.”
Thus, up to the date of the publication of the _Origin of Species_,
scientific opinion was roughly divided into two opposing camps: on one
side were the classic, orthodox, catastrophic, or creationist party, who
believed in the fixity of species, and that each species was the result
of special miraculous creation; on the other, the evolutionists or
transmutationists, who rejected special creation, and held that all
species were derived from other species, by some unknown law.
It was the formulation of this unknown law that makes 1859 an epoch in
the history of Anthropology.
[Sidenote: =Charles Darwin.=]
Darwin’s work may best be summed up in the words of his loyal and
self-effacing co-worker, Alfred Russel Wallace:—
Before Darwin’s work appeared the great majority of naturalists,
and almost without exception the whole literary and scientific
world, held firmly to the belief that species were realities,
and had not been derived from other species by any process
accessible to us ... [but] by some totally unknown process so
far removed from ordinary reproduction that it was usually
spoken of as “special creation.”... But now all this is changed.
The whole scientific and literary world, even the whole educated
public, accepts, as a matter of common knowledge, the origin of
species from other allied species by the ordinary process of
natural birth. The idea of special creation or any altogether
exceptional mode of production is absolutely extinct.... And
this vast, this totally unprecedented, change in public opinion
has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought
about in the short space of twenty years.
Huxley describes the attitude towards the theory in the year following
the publication of the _Origin of Species_: “In the year 1860 there was
nothing more volcanic, more shocking, more subversive of everything
right and proper, than to put forward the proposition that, as far as
physical organisation is concerned, there is less difference between man
and the highest apes than there is between the highest apes and the
lowest.... That question was not a pleasant one to handle.” But the
“horrible paradoxes of one generation became the commonplaces of
schoolboys”; and the “startling proposition” of 1860 was, twenty years
later, a “fact that no rational man could dispute.”[42]
Footnote 42:
Add. Brit. Ass., 1878, Dublin.
This question of the difference between man and the apes was embittered
by the personal encounter between Huxley and Owen. Professor Owen, in
1857, stated that the _hippocampus minor_, which characterises the hind
lobe in each hemisphere in the human brain, is peculiar to the genus
_Homo_. This Huxley denied;[43] and, as neither disputant would
acknowledge that he was mistaken, the question became “one of personal
veracity.”
Footnote 43:
“It is not I who seek to base man’s dignity upon his great toe, or to
insinuate that we are lost if an ape has a _hippocampus
minor_.”—_Anth. Rev._, I., 113.
As a possible explanation of this famous dispute, it is interesting to
note the discovery announced by Professor D. J. Cunningham of the
absence of this cavity on one side of the brain of an orang-utan, with
the suggestion that Owen “may in the first instance have been misled by
an abnormal brain of this kind.”[44]
Footnote 44:
Cunn. Mem., II., R.I.A., p. 128.
The further history of the development, expansion, and curtailment of
the Darwinian theory as such lies beyond the scope of this little book.
The criticisms of sexual selection and of the origin of the higher
mental characters of man by Wallace; the denial of the inheritability of
acquired characters by August Weismann and others; the orthogenesis
theory of Theodore Eimer, the “mutation” theory of Hugo de Vries and
Mendel’s researches—all opened up lively controversies, and the field of
science is still clouded with the smoke of their battles.
The ferment provoked by the publication of Darwin’s _Origin of Species_
profoundly affected, as was natural, the nascent science of
Anthropology. At the meeting of the British Association in Nottingham in
1866 Dr. James Hunt read an address before the Anthropological
Department to show that “the recent application of Mr. Darwin’s
hypothesis of ‘natural selection’ to anthropology by some of Mr.
Darwin’s disciples is wholly unwarranted either by logic or by
facts.”[45] In this address he said that he still believed the deduction
he had made three years previously—“that there is as good reason for
classifying the negro as a distinct. species from the European as there
is for making the ass a distinct species from the zebra; and if, in
classification, we take intelligence into consideration, there is a far
greater difference between the negro and the European than between the
gorilla and chimpanzee.” He insisted that “anthropologists are bound to
take the totality of the characteristics of the different types of man
into consideration. “It is to be regretted, however,” Dr. Hunt
continues, “that there are many writers in Germany who have recently
written as though the question of man’s place in nature were settled”;
but he is delighted to find that “Professor Carl Vogt is doing all he
can to show the fallacy of the unity hypothesis.” He quotes Professor
Vogt as saying: “This much is certain, that each of these anthropoid
apes has its peculiar characters by which it approaches man.... If, in
the different regions of the globe, anthropoid apes may issue from
different stocks, we cannot see why these different stocks should be
denied further development into the human type, and that only one stock
should possess this privilege. The further we go back in history the
greater is the contrast between individual types, the more opposed are
the characters.”
Footnote 45:
_Anth. Rev._, iv., 320.
The controversies and discussions of this period were not confined to
those who had technical knowledge or scientifically trained minds. All
sorts of people joined in the fray, mainly because they fancied that the
new ideas were subversive of “revealed religion”; but it would serve no
useful purpose to recall the false statements and bitter expressions
that were bandied about. Some had merely a sentimental objection to the
doctrine of evolution; but at the present day most people would
subscribe to the declaration of Broca, who wrote: “Quant à moi, je
trouve plus de gloire à monter qu’à descendre et si j’admettais
l’intervention des impressions sentimentales dans les sciences, je
dirais que j’aimerais mieux être un singe perfectionné qu’un Adam
dégénéré.”[46]
Footnote 46:
_Mémoires d’Anthropologie_, iii., p. 146.
[Sidenote: =The Negro’s Place in Nature.=]
Another controversy, which, though mainly political in origin, cleft the
ranks of the anthropologists, arose from the slavery question. Clarkson
had started his agitation for the abolition of the slave trade about
1782, and during the early years of the nineteenth century many
unsuccessful attempts were made to bring the system to an end in
America. In 1826 over a hundred anti-slavery societies were in
existence, mainly in the middle belt of the States, while the Cotton
States were equally unanimous and vehement in opposition. Feeling
naturally ran high; riots, murders, lynchings, raids, and general
lawlessness characterised the agitation on both sides, and added fuel to
the flames which finally dissolved the Union in 1860. At home the
question was hotly debated, and popular feeling was excited by the
speeches of Clarkson and Wilberforce, and, most of all, by the
publication of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852). Being mainly a question of
race, Anthropology was soon implicated, monogenists and polygenists
naturally ranked themselves on opposite sides, and the Ethnological
Society became a strong partisan of the philanthropists and
abolitionists.
In the midst of the excitement James Hunt, Honorary Fellow of the
Ethnological Society and President of the newly formed Anthropological
Society, read (1863) his paper on “The Negro’s Place in Nature.”[47] In
this he carefully examined all the evidence on the subject, physical and
psychical, and arrived at the conclusion that “the negro is
intellectually inferior to the European, and that the analogies are far
more numerous between the ape and negro than between the ape and the
European”; moreover, that “the negro becomes more humanised when in his
natural subordination to the European than under any other
circumstances,” “that the negro race can only be humanised and civilised
by Europeans,” and “that European civilisation is not suited to the
negro’s requirements or character.” An abstract of the paper was read by
Dr. Hunt at the meeting of the British Association at Newcastle, 1863,
where the presence of an eloquent coloured speaker enlivened the
subsequent discussion.[48] A tremendous outcry greeted the publication
of this paper, and tightened the tension on the already strained
relations between the two societies. Fierce denunciations from Exeter
Hall and the “broad-brimmed school of philanthropists” were matched by
equally vehement applause from the opposing camp. When Dr. Hunt died, a
few years later, the following obituary notice, extracted from a New
York paper, appeared in the _Anthropological Review_,[49] under the
heading “Death of the Best Man in England”:—
Footnote 47:
_Mem. Anth._, I., p. i.
Footnote 48:
_Anth. Rev._, i., p. 386.
Footnote 49:
January, 1870, p. 97.
We are pained to hear of the death of Dr. James Hunt, beyond
doubt the best, or at all events the most useful, man in
England, if not, indeed, in Europe. The man that leads all
other men in knowledge essential to human well-being, that
thus extends the bounds of human happiness, and best
illustrates the wisdom and beneficence of the Almighty Creator
to His creatures, is, _per se_ and of necessity, the best man
of his generation; and such a man was the late Dr. James Hunt
of England.... Dr. Hunt, in his own clear knowledge and brave
enthusiasm, was doing more for humanity, for the welfare of
mankind, and for the glory of God, than all the philosophers,
humanitarians, philanthropists, statesmen, and, we may say,
bishops and clergy of England together.... His death at the
early age of thirty-six is a great loss to England, to
Christendom, to all mankind; for, though there are many others
labouring in the same great cause, especially in France and
Germany, there was no European of this generation so clear and
profound in the science of humanity as Dr. Hunt.
A serious discussion of the anatomical and psychological relation of the
negro to the European is still to the fore, especially in the United
States of North America. But even as late as 1900 a book was published
in America with the following title, and we have been informed that it
has had a very large sale in the Southern States:—
THE NEGRO A BEAST; or, “IN THE IMAGE OF GOD.” _The Reasoner of
the Age, the Revelator of the Century! The Bible as it is! The
Negro and His Relation to the Human Family!_ The Negro a beast,
but created with articulate speech, and hands, that he may be of
service to his master—the White man. _The Negro not the Son of
Ham_, neither can it be proven by the Bible, and the argument of
the theologian who would claim such, melts to mist before the
thunderous and convincing arguments of this masterful book. By
Charles Carroll, who has spent fifteen years of his life and
$20,000.00 in its compilation. Published by American Book and
Bible House, St. Louis, Mo., 1900.
The publishers are “convinced that when this book is read ... it will be
to the minds of the American people like unto the voice of God from the
clouds appealing unto Paul on his way to Damascus.”
This preposterous book could appeal only to the ignorant and bigoted,
and we mention it merely as an extreme instance of the difficulties
against which science has sometimes to contend when dealing with burning
social questions.
The latest word on this subject is by Professor F. Boas, who believes
that the negro in his physical and mental make-up is not similar to the
European. “There is, however, no proof whatever that these differences
signify any appreciable degree of inferiority of the negro ... for these
racial differences are much less than the range of variation found in
either race considered by itself.... The anatomy of the American negro
is not well known; and, notwithstanding the oft-repeated assertions
regarding the hereditary inferiority of the mulatto, we know hardly
anything on the subject.”[50] The real problem in America is the
mulatto, since “the conditions are such that the persistence of the pure
negro type is practically impossible.”
Footnote 50:
Franz Boas, “Race Problems in America,” _Science_, N.S. xxix., p. 848,
1909.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV.
THE UNFOLDING OF THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN
[Sidenote: =Fossil Man.=]
IGNORANCE and prejudice combined to assert that man was created a few
thousand years ago in a state of physical perfection. The possibility of
the discovery of fossil man was therefore inconceivable to most people,
and those earlier writers who entertained the idea were generally
inclined to deny it. Cuvier, limiting the age of the earth to the
orthodox 6,000 years, had stated that fossil bones of man did not exist.
Moreover, up to the time of his death (1832) nothing had been found to
disturb this generally received opinion.
More than a hundred years before (1726) Professor Scheuchzer, of Zürich,
had discovered his famous “_Homo diluvii testis_”—“Man, witness of the
Flood”—and had described it as a “rare relic of the accursed race of the
primitive world,” exclaiming piously: “Melancholy skeleton of an old
sinner, convert the hearts of modern reprobates!” His fossil was proved
later to be that of a gigantic salamander, and fossil man was allowed to
sleep for more than a century.
When the question was again raised, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, evidence of human remains which had been hitherto disregarded
assumed a new importance, and earlier finds were re-examined.
[Sidenote: =Cannstadt.= Neanderthal.]
First there was the Cannstadt cranium, found in 1700 by Duke Eberhard of
Würtemberg, which remained undescribed for 135 years in the Stuttgart
Museum. Later it was claimed as belonging to the prehistoric “race,”
proofs of whose existence were so rapidly accumulating. In 1856 a fresh
stimulus was given by the discovery of a cranium and some other remains
in the Feldhofen Cave, at the entrance to a small ravine called
Neanderthal, on the right bank of the river Düssel, in Rhenish Prussia.
This was the first discovery of remains of palæolithic man to
receive serious attention. The skeleton was embedded in a hard,
consolidated loam, but unfortunately was badly damaged by the
workmen before it was extricated. By the intervention of Fuhlrott,
the thigh bones, the upper bone of each arm, shoulder-blade,
collar-bone, some fragments of ribs and the cranium, were rescued,
and are now in the Rheinische-Antiquitäts’ Museum at Bonn. When the
remains were first exhibited by their discoverer at Bonn, doubts
were freely expressed as to their human character. Virchow
pronounced his opinion that the cranium was diseased; in the long
controversy which raged over this skull his wide pathological
experience, his distrust of merely morphological considerations, his
agnostic position with regard to the origin of species in general
and of man in particular, led him, perhaps, to propound this extreme
view. Broca declared it to be normal. Huxley recognised the skull as
human, but declared it to be the most ape-like ever discovered; and
he placed it below the Australian in type.
No absolute reliance could, however, be placed on the evidence of a
single skull, and an imperfect one at that; but later discoveries served
in the main to confirm Huxley’s opinion.
[Sidenote: =Spy.=]
Another important find was that of two crania and other skeletal remains
discovered in 1886 at Spy, in the Namur district, Belgium, by de Puydt
and Lohest,[51] with an associated fauna which included the woolly
rhinoceros, mammoth, cave bear, hyæna, etc., five out of the nine
species being extinct.
Footnote 51:
Fraipont et Lohest, _Arch. de Biol._, vii., 1887, p. 623.
[Sidenote: =Other Finds.=]
Since 1886 new discoveries of human remains have been made at short
intervals in various parts of Europe, and these range in date from
historic to prehistoric times, the oldest skulls having naturally the
most interest.
The very careful studies of these remains that have been made by
numerous anatomists are of extreme interest to students, and their
general conclusions will be found summarised in certain text-books; but
the details are of a somewhat technical character. Suffice it to say
that even as far back as the palæolithic period, when men used only
chipped stone implements, there were several human varieties in Europe;
and, though in their anatomical characters they were in some respects
more animal-like than existing Europeans, they were scarcely more so
than certain non-European races of the present day—such, for example, as
the Australian. In all cases the skulls were unmistakably those of true
men, but on the whole it may be said that the points in which they
differed from more recent Europeans betrayed “lower” characters.
In order that the reader may appreciate what rapid progress is now being
made in this direction, we give a brief account of the most recent
discoveries of fossil man.
[Sidenote: =Homo Heidelbergensis.=]
In October, 1907, a lower jaw was found in a deposit of sand at Mauer,
near Heidelberg. The teeth are typically human; but the chinless jaw,
with its thick body, very broad and short ascending portion, and other
special points, surpasses in its combination of primitive characters all
known recent and ancient human jaws, thus it is a generalised type from
which they can readily be derived. It has been suggested that, as the
jaw is neither distinctly human nor anthropoid, it is a survival from
that remote ancestor from which there branched off on the one side the
genus Homo, and on the other the genera of anthropoid apes. Dr. O.
Schoetensack regards _Homo Heidelbergensis_ as of early Pleistocene or
late Pliocene age; but Dr. E. Werth[52] relegates it to the middle of
the Ice Age.
Footnote 52:
_Globus_, xcvi., 1909, p. 229.
[Sidenote: =Homo Primigenius.=]
In March, 1908, Herr Otto Hauser found a skeleton of a young man in the
upper valley of the Vézère, Dordogne; the skull had a receding forehead,
prominent jaws, and large orbits, surmounted by massive brow-ridges; the
limbs were short. It was a distinct burial with associated objects which
prove it to be of Mousterian age (p. 75, _n._ 2).
Also of Mousterian age are the skeleton discovered in August, 1908,[53]
and the skull in February, 1909, at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, Corrèze, and
the skeleton exhumed in September in the latter year at Ferrassie,
Dordogne, by M. Peyrony, who had previously discovered another skeleton
of the same age at Peche de l’Azé, near Sarlat, also in Dordogne. These
two finds have not yet been described.
Footnote 53:
Bouysonnie et Bardon, _l’Anthropologie_, xix., 1908, p. 513.
[Illustration:
SKULL OF THE FOSSIL MAN OF LA CHAPELLE-AUX-SAINTS,
after the restoration of the nasal bones and jaws. From
_l’Anthropologie_, xx.,
1909, p. 267; with the permission of Professor M. Boule.
]
Compared with the short stature (5ft. 3in.) of the La Chapelle man, the
skull is of remarkably large size. It is narrow, with a flattened
cranial vault and enormous brow-ridges; the orbits are large, and the
face is very projecting. Professor Boule agrees with other investigators
in regarding this skull as belonging to the Neanderthal-Spy type, and
considers that the group is distinct from all other human groups, living
or fossil.[54]
Footnote 54:
M. Boule, _l’Anthropologie_, xix., 1908, p. 519; xx., 1909, p. 257.
See also M. Alsberg, _Globus_, xcv., 1909, and H. Klaatsch, _Arch. für
Anth._, N.F., vii., p. 287.
As Professor Sollas points out, “the primitive inhabitants of France
were distinguished from the highest civilized races, not by a smaller,
but by a larger, cranial capacity; in other words, as we proceed
backwards in time the human brain increases in volume.”[55] We know that
they buried their dead, and in some cases provided weapons and food for
use in a future state. Their inventiveness is proved by the variety and
gradual improvement in the technique of their tools and weapons. Their
carvings in the round or low relief, their spirited engravings on bone
and ivory, and their wonderful mural paintings, whether in outline,
shaded monochrome, or polychrome, evince an astonishing æsthetic sense
and technical skill.
Footnote 55:
_Quart. Journ. Geol. Sci._, vol. 66, 1910, p. lxii.
As the diggers in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Crete, and elsewhere, have
proved that civilisation was far more ancient than could have been
conceived even fifty years ago, so the cave explorers have shown us that
during the latter half of the Palæolithic age there lived mighty
hunters, skilful artists, big-brained men, who laid the foundations upon
which subsequent generations have built. This, then, is the lesson that
the latest results of investigations into the antiquity of man has
taught us—that brain, not brawn, has been the essential factor in the
evolution of man. The human brain had developed at a greater rate than
the body, which even then retained unmistakable evidence of man’s lowly
origin. How long had this evolution been progressing before Mousterian
times?[56] The ruder stone implements of the Acheulian and Chellian
epochs carry us an appreciable time backward; and if even some of the
eoliths are artifacts, we can project tool-using man to yet earlier
times. Then the record becomes blurred, as it is manifestly impossible
to decide whether simple bruising of stones was caused by man or natural
agencies.
Footnote 56:
W. L. H. Duckworth, _Morphology and Anthropology_, 1904, p. 520.
[Sidenote: =Pithecanthropus erectus.=]
But these investigations all fade into relative insignificance compared
with the sensation caused by the discovery made by Dr. Dubois in Java in
1891. Dr. Eugene Dubois was a graduate of Leyden University who, besides
having some knowledge of geology and palæontology, had attained
distinction in anatomy. Between 1890 and 1896 he was stationed in Java,
as surgeon to the Dutch Indian army, and by order of the Government he
conducted some explorations with a view to determining the fossil fauna
which had been discovered in those parts many years before. While
examining the beds attributed to the Pleistocene period below the dry
season level of the Bengawan River, at Trinil, he found the teeth,
calvarium, and femur of the now world-famous _Pithecanthropus erectus_.
This was announced even in scientific journals as “The ‘Missing Link’
found at last.” Dubois published his account in Java in 1894, and since
that date a vast amount of literature has accumulated round the subject,
representing the three antagonistic points of view. Some, like Virchow,
Krause, Waldeyer, Ranke, Bumüller, Hamann, and Ten Kate, claim a simian
origin for the remains; Turner, Cunningham, Keith, Lydekker, Rudolf
Martin, and Topinard believed them to be human; while Dubois,
Manouvrier, Marsh, Haeckel, Nehring, Verneau, Schwalbe, Klaatsch, and
Duckworth ascribe them to an intermediate form. The last-mentioned sums
up the evidence in these words: “I believe that in _Pithecanthropus
erectus_ we possess the nearest likeness yet found of the human
ancestor, at a stage immediately antecedent to the definitely human
phase, and yet at the same time in advance of the simian stage.”[57]
Footnote 57:
“The lowest term of the human series yet discovered is represented by
Pithecanthropus, and dates from some part of the Pleistocene epoch”
(W. J. Sollas, _Science Progress_, 1908, p. 353). See also W. Volz,
_Neues Jahrb. f. Mineral._, 1907.
The English, as Dr. Dubois somewhat slyly noted, claimed the remains as
human; while the Germans declared them to be simian; he himself, as a
Dutchman, assigned them to a mixture of both.
The geological horizon in which the remains of _Pithecanthropus erectus_
were discovered is still an open question. Of late opinion seems to tend
towards regarding it as belonging to the early Pleistocene instead of
the Pliocene, to which it was at first referred.[58] After reviewing all
the evidence concerning Tertiary man, Professor Sollas concludes:—“We
have now reached the end of this summary, and find ourselves precisely
where we were, having obtained no evidence either for or against the
existence of man in times previous to the great Ice Age” (_loc. cit._,
p. 350).
Footnote 58:
The terms Magdalenian, Solutrian, Aurignacian, Mousterian, Acheulian,
Chellian, refer to various epochs of culture in Palæolithic times,
giving their sequence from the newest to the most ancient. These
epochs are further sub-divided by some investigators, and several, if
not all of them, are connected by intermediate stages. In other words,
the remains prove that a steady evolution in culture has taken place.
Nowhere do all these layers occur in one locality, and the evidence of
their order is a matter of stratigraphy (_i.e._, it is essentially a
geological method). Palæontology decides on the animal remains found
in the beds. The human anatomist discusses the human remains, and the
archæologist deals with the artifacts or objects made by man. The
accurate determination of the order of the beds is obviously of
fundamental importance.
The discovery of these human remains has had a very noticeable effect on
anthropometry. Most of them are imperfect, some very much so; as in the
case, for example, of the partial calvaria of Pithecanthropus and of the
Neanderthal specimen. The remains are of such intense interest that they
stimulated anatomists to a more careful analysis and comparison with
other human skulls and with those of anthropoids. As time rolled on, new
ways of looking at the problems suggested themselves, which led to the
employment of more elaborate methods of measurement or description.
Almost every specimen of fossil man has led to some improvement in
technical research; and the subject is not yet exhausted, as the
character of the inner walls of the crania have not yet yielded all
their secrets, more particularly in regard to the brains which they once
protected. It would be tedious to enumerate the names of those who have
studied even the two calvaria just mentioned, and impossible to record
all of those who have advanced our knowledge of the anatomy of fossil
man.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V.
COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY
AT the present time the data for a comparison of the bodily functions of
the members of one race with those of another are so scanty that the
science of ethnical physiology can scarcely be said to exist.
Fortunately, there is a quite different state of affairs for the study
of the mind—or Psychology—though even in this field there is yet a great
deal of work to be done.
During the eighteenth century the term “Anthropology,” which was very
vaguely employed, was often used to designate a comprehensive psychology
dealing with the entire mental side of man, as well as the relations
between soul and body. Later, as its scope became widened, the centre of
gravity shifted over to physical man; but anthropologists have always
maintained their right to deal also more or less with psychology.
[Sidenote: =Phrenology.=]
Psychology in early times concerned itself with the essence of the soul
as an independent entity, its relations to the body, its destructibility
or indestructibility, and the laws of its operations. The word
“Psychology” has always had a vague and varying significance. Thus, when
Hunt, in his presidential address before the Anthropological Society in
1866, says: “I am glad to know that there are many Fellows of this
Society who are at present working on the psychological aspects of our
science,” he referred to the interest then taken by the members in the
phrenology of the period. Later on, however, he expresses his opinion
with regard to “modern phrenology” as being “wholly unscientific.” The
old phrenology is now practically dead.
[Sidenote: =Psychical Research.=]
During the last quarter of the last century a study of various obscure
mental states received a fresh impetus in this country by the founding
of the Society for Psychical Research. This society principally
investigates (1) hypnotism, disorders of personality, automatic writing,
and crystal-gazing, which are universally recognised by psychologists as
furnishing fields for scientific study; and (2) thought-transference and
its manifestations, which are not, however, at present generally
accepted as facts.
Though but recently crept forth, _vix aut ne vix quidem_, from
the chill shade of scientific disdain, Anthropology adopts the
airs of her elder sisters among the sciences, and is as severe
as they to the Cinderella of the family, Psychical Research. She
must murmur of her fairies among the cinders of the hearth,
while they go forth to the ball, and dance with provincial
mayors at the festivities of the British Association.[59]
Footnote 59:
A. Lang, _Making of Religion_, p. 43.
The hypnotic and kindred practices of the lower races have until lately
scarcely attracted the attention of anthropologists. Bastian in 1890
wrote a tract, _Ueber psychische Beobachtungen bei Naturvölkern_, and
Tylor has also touched on the subject in _Primitive Culture_; but its
main advocate is Andrew Lang, who declares: “Anthropology must remain
incomplete while it neglects this field, whether among wild or civilised
men,” and “In the course of time this will come to be acknowledged.”
[Sidenote: =Methods and Aims.=]
If we turn now from popular to scientific notions of psychology, we
discern the following methods and aims of the science. There are two
methods—(1) the introspective, by which one’s own mental states are
observed; and (2) the objective, by which the conduct of others is
observed: both may be studied without or under experimental conditions.
It is very difficult to secure reliable introspection in backward
peoples, and also to interpret the mental state of an individual by
observing his behaviour.
The objects of psychology are five-fold:—
1. The study of mind compared with non-mental processes.
2. The study of the mind of the individual compared with other minds.
3. The study of the normal mind of the individual compared with the
abnormal.
4. The study of the mind of one race compared with that of other races.
5. The study of the mind of genus Homo compared with that of animals.
All these are of interest and value for Anthropology, especially the
second, fourth, and fifth.
In the earlier days of psychology, when the subject was in the
leading-strings of philosophy, it had little ethnological value. Indeed,
the possibility of such a subject as ethnological psychology was not
realised.
[Sidenote: =Ethnical Psychology.=]
Ethnical psychology, the study of the mind of other races and peoples,
of which, among the more backward races, glimpses can be obtained only
by living among them and endeavouring to reach their point of view by
means of observation and experiment, is a modern conception; and for
this branch of the subject there is no history.
As an illustration of the change of attitude with regard to ethnical
psychology during the last fifty years, we may quote from Burmeister[60]
in 1853: “It is not worth while to look into the soul of the negro. It
is a judgment of God which is being executed that, at the approach of
civilisation, the savage man must perish”; and again,[61] in 1857: “I
have often tried to obtain an insight into the mind of the negro, but it
was never worth the trouble.” Compare with this such works as R. E.
Dennett’s _At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind_, 1906. In justification
of his attempt to represent the basal ideas of the West African native,
Dennett says: “I cannot help feeling that one who has lived so long
among the Africans, and who has acquired a kind of way of thinking
black, should be listened to on the off-chance that a secondary
instinct, developed by long contact with the people he is writing about,
may have driven him to a right, or very nearly right, conclusion” (pp.
133-4). And as the keynote of his elaborate investigation, which results
in “crediting the Africans with thoughts, concerning their religious and
political system, comparable to any that may have been handed down” to
ourselves by our own ancestors, he quotes from Flora L. Shaw[62]: “It
may happen that we shall have to revise entirely our view of the black
races, and regard those who now exist as the decadent representatives of
an almost forgotten era, rather than as the embryonic possibility of an
era yet to come.”
Footnote 60:
_Der Schwarze Mensch._
Footnote 61:
_Reise nach Brasilien._
Footnote 62:
Flora L. Shaw (Lady Lugard), _A Tropical Dependency_, p. 17.
The earliest recognition of the anthropological aspect of psychology is
found in Germany, where Bastian was always insisting on the essential
connection between psychology and ethnology; and, although his own
literary method was peculiarly obscure, he did a very great deal, both
by his writings and personal influence, to stimulate the study of
psychology from the point of view of ethnology.
[Illustration:
P. W. A. BASTIAN.
]
[Sidenote: =Bastian.=]
[Sidenote: =Folk Psychology.=]
Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), after passing through five
universities—Heidelberg, Berlin, Jena, Wurzburg, and Prague—began his
life of travel in 1851 as a ship’s doctor. The next twenty-five years
were mainly spent in voyages of research in all parts of the world, and
always with one object in view—the collection of materials for a
comparative psychology, on the principles of a natural science. His
first journey, which occupied eight years, resulted in the publication
in 1860 of the first of a long series of writings. When not engaged in
travel, his life was filled with his work in connection with the Berlin
Museums. Great though these services were, Bastian’s main interest was
always concentrated on psychology. The ideas of folk psychology were in
the air, and the study of _Welt-Anschauung_, or, to use Bastian’s
phrase, _Völker-Gedanken_, was already inaugurated in Germany. To
organise this study by introducing wide scientific, inductive, and
comparative methods, and to collect evidence from among all the peoples
of the earth, was Bastian’s life-work, in which he was still engaged
when death overtook him at Trinidad in 1905. Among the conceptions of
the _Natur-Völker_—the “cryptograms of mankind,” as he called them—he
worked unceasingly, demonstrating first the surprising uniformity of
outlook on the part of the more primitive peoples, and secondly the
correlation of differences of conceptions with differences in material
surroundings, varying with geographical conditions. This second doctrine
he elaborated in his _Zur Lehre von den Geographischen Provinzen_, in
1886.
The term “psychology of peoples” has become familiar of late, and books
have been written on the psychology of special peoples, such as the
_Esquisse psychologique des Peuples Européens_ (1903), by A. Fouillée;
but these are based on general considerations, and not on experimental
evidence.
The place of Comparative Psychology in Anthropology was officially
determined in this country by the request which the Anthropological
Institute made to Herbert Spencer in 1875, to map out the Comparative
Psychology of Man, with a view to providing some sort of method in
handling the various questions that came before the Institute. The
result of this was Spencer’s provisional Scheme of Character, in which
the problem of measurement took an important place.
[Sidenote: =Experimental Psychology.=]
In the department of experimental psychology Germany again took the
lead. G. T. Fechner[63] attempted by means of laboratory tests to
discover the law of connection between psychical and bodily events. A
band of workers arose, and the new science spread to other countries. In
our country Sir Francis Galton took advantage of the International
Health Exhibition at London, 1884, to install in the exhibition an
anthropometric laboratory, in which a few psychological experiments were
made on a large number of people, and since then he has frequently made
arrangements for similar laboratories.
Footnote 63:
_Elemente der Psychophysik_, 1860.
In nearly all of the larger universities Experimental Psychology is a
recognised study, and almost every variety of mental condition is
investigated. Professor W. Wundt, in his _Völkerpsychologie_ (1904), has
been a master-builder on these foundations.
The experiments in psychological laboratories were of necessity confined
to subjects readily accessible, who naturally were mainly Europeans or
of European descent. A few observations had been made on aliens who, as
a rule, had been brought from their native countries for show purposes;
but in these cases the observations were made under unfavourable
conditions so far as the subject was concerned. With the exception of
these very few and unsatisfactory investigations, experimental
psychology was mainly concerned with the subjects numbered 2, 3, and 5
in the table on p. 81.
A new departure was made in 1898 by the Cambridge Anthropological
Expedition to Torres Straits. For the first time trained experimental
psychologists (Drs. W. H. R. Rivers, W. McDougall, and C. S. Myers)
investigated by means of an adequate laboratory equipment a people in a
low stage of culture under their ordinary conditions of life. The
foundations of ethnical experimental psychology were thus laid.
Professor R. W. Woodworth sums up the conclusions arrived at from his
own observations and those of others as follows: “We are probably
justified in inferring that the sensory and motor processes and the
elementary brain activities, though differing in degree from one
individual to another, are about the same from one race to another.”[64]
Footnote 64:
_Science_, xxxi., 1910, p. 179.
Lately an attempt has been made, under the auspices of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, to provide travellers with instructions for
psychological investigations in the field.
[Sidenote: =Eugenics.=]
During the last few years the subject of race improvement, or Eugenics,
has been greatly to the fore, and it has been in this country mainly
connected with the name of Sir Francis Galton, who as long ago as 1865
published his views on the subject. Eugenics is officially defined in
the Minutes of the University of London as “the study of agencies under
social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future
generations, either physically or mentally.” A eugenics laboratory has
recently been established in University College, London, in connection
with Professor Karl Pearson’s biometric laboratory.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI.
THE CLASSIFICATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF MAN
[Sidenote: =Race Description and Classification.=]
After the age of race discrimination comes the age of race description
and classification; and, as we should expect, this second stage is not
reached until the close of the Dark Ages and the dawn of the
Renaissance, when thought had been emancipated from the bondage of
scholastic authority and stimulated by the new impulse which infected
all forms of intellectual activity.
[Sidenote: =Bernier.=]
The first attempt at the classification of mankind was that of a French
traveller, F. Bernier (1625-1688), whose scheme appeared in an anonymous
article in the _Journal des Scavans_, 1684, entitled “A new division of
the earth, according to the different species or races of men who
inhabit it,” etc.[65]
Footnote 65:
See T. Bendyshe, _Mem. Anth. Soc._, I., 1865, p. 360.
He distinguished “four or five species or races”: (1) The inhabitants of
Europe, North Africa (including the Egyptians), and a great part of Asia
(including the Indians). He notes that the Egyptians and Indians are
black or copper-coloured, but considered the complexion to be due to
climate. (2) The Africans, with thick lips, flat noses, and black skins,
due not to climate but nature, with scanty beard and woolly hair. (3)
The Asiatics not included in the first group, white, with “broad
shoulders, a flat face, a small squab nose, little pig’s-eyes long and
deep-set, and three hairs of beard.” (4) The Lapps, “little stunted
creatures, with thick legs, large shoulders, short neck, and a face
elongated immensely; very ugly, and partaking much of the bear; they are
wretched animals.” He hesitates whether to put the Americans or the
inhabitants of South Africa, who are unlike the Negroes, into a fifth
class. The latter are probably the Hottentots or Bushmen, in spite of
his statement that “some of the Dutch say they speak _turkey_.”
[Sidenote: =Linnæus.=]
The next classification was that of Linnæus. His service to Anthropology
by fixing the place of _Homo sapiens_ in the animal kingdom has already
been noted (p. 19). In the first edition of the _Systema naturæ_
(1735),[66] Man is classed as a quadruped, and together with the Ape and
Sloth constitutes the order _Anthropomorpha_. Four varieties of Homo are
recorded: _H. Europæus albesc._, _Americanus rubesc._, _Asiaticus
fuscus_, _Africanus nigr._ In the second edition (1740) _Homo_ is
divided into the same four varieties, which are distinguished by the
colour of their skin, located severally, one in each of the then known
continents—_Europæus albus_, _Americanus rubescens_, _Asiaticus fuscus_,
and _Africanus niger_.
Footnote 66:
These accounts have been taken from the original editions; but the
reader is referred to the verbatim copy given by Bendyshe in the _Mem.
Anth. Soc._, I., 1865, p. 421.
In the tenth edition (1758) more divisions are recognised: the genus
Homo consists of two species—Sapiens, 1 H. diurnus. _Ferus_, including
hairy men without speech who run about on all-fours, of which six
records are given; _Americanus_ (α) and _Europæus_ (β), _Asiaticus_ (γ),
_Afer_ (δ), _Monstrosus_ (ε), which include (_a_) _Alpini_ (small),
_Patagonici_ (large); (_b_) _Monorchides_—Hottentotti, _Junceæ_—Europæ;
(_c_) _Macrocephali_—Chinenses, _Plagiocephali_—Canadenses. A second
species being Troglodytes 2. H. nocturnus (Homo sylvestris
Orang-Outang). This classification was retained in the twelfth edition
(1772). In these two latter editions the genera Simia, Lemur, and
Vespertilio were classed with Homo in the order Primates.
In _Fauna Suecica_, published in 1746, Linnæus made a more detailed
classification of the population of Sweden, recognising three main
types, distinguished by their stature, hair, and eye colour. These were
the Goths, tall, hair white and straight, iris of the eyes ashen blue;
Finns, with muscular body, hair long and yellow, and dark iris; and
Lapps, with small, thin body, straight black hair, and iris blackish.
[Sidenote: =Blumenbach.=]
Blumenbach (1775) based his classification not only on skin colour, but
also on skull form. To the four groups of Linnæus he added a fifth,
dividing the one species into five varieties—the Caucasian, the
Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the American, and the Malayan. The last group
included the then little known Australian, Papuan, and pure Malay types.
Blumenbach was the originator of the unfortunate title “Caucasian”[67]
to represent the typical European and the inhabitants of Eastern Asia
and Northern Africa. He chose the name partly because the Caucasus
produces the most beautiful race of men, and also on account of the fine
Georgian skull in his collection.[68] It was unfortunate, since, as
Ripley points out (1900, p. 436), nowhere else in Europe is found such a
heterogeneity of physical types—the only one conspicuously missing being
the fair-haired, blue-eyed European—and such a diversity of language,
sixty-eight dialects being here jumbled together, and only one possessed
of (possibly) Aryan origin. The name “Caucasian” has, therefore, not led
to clarification of ideas in the complex problem of European ethnology.
Keane (1899), however, supports its use, saying: “Those who object to
Caucasic are apt to forget the vast field that has to be embraced by
this single collective term.” “Caucasic, when properly understood ...
cannot be dispensed with until a more suitable general term be
discovered” (p. 447).
Footnote 67:
_Anthrop. Treatises of Blumenbach_, translated by T. Bendyshe, 1865,
pp. 265, 269.
Footnote 68:
Waitz, 1863, p. 233, _f.n._, who adds: “without any intention on his
part to express thereby an opinion as to the cradle of these peoples.”
Keane, 1896, p. 226.
[Sidenote: =Other Classifications.=]
The next important classification was that of Cuvier, who derived
mankind from the three sons of Noah, Japhet being regarded as the parent
of the Caucasic, Shem of the Mongolian, and Ham of the African races.
The divergence of type between the three brothers is not explained,
except that the blackness of the descendants of Ham was attributed to
the curse imposed by Noah on Canaan, the son of Ham (Gen. ix. 25).
Other classifications followed, the divisions varying from two species,
white and black, Virey (1801), to the fifteen or sixteen of the
Polygenists, Desmoulins (1825-6), and Bory de Saint-Vincent (1827), and
the thirty-four of Haeckel (1873).
In America L. Agassiz, an uncompromising opponent of evolution,
asserted, in 1845,[69] the unity of mankind as a species; but in
1850[70] we find him distribute eleven or twelve, in 1853 (in Nott and
Gliddon) eight, human species in as many geological and botanical
provinces. But this theory had been previously promulgated by Desmoulins
(1826) and by Swainson (in 1835).[71] As Waitz rightly says: “They are
completely in error who, adopting the views of Agassiz, assume as many
original types of mankind as there are typically different peoples on
the globe” (1864, p. 203).
Footnote 69:
Smith, 1850, _Unity of the Human Races_, p. 349.
Footnote 70:
_Christian Examiner_, Boston, July, 1850.
Footnote 71:
_Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals._
It was not until the nineteenth century that a really scientific method
of classification was adopted. In the majority of these schemes the
character of the hair was chosen as the primary race-characteristic.
[Sidenote: =Pruner Bey.=]
The hair had already been studied by Heusinger (1822), by Blower, of
Philadelphia, and by Kölliker, the histologist, before the publication
of Pruner Bey’s classic memoir, read before the Paris Anthropological
Society in 1863, and published in the same year. Dr. Pruner Bey claimed
that the quality of the hair constituted one of the best means of
race-identification, and even that “a single hair presenting the average
form characteristic of the race might serve to define it.”
[Sidenote: =Bory de St. Vincent.=]
Long before this, in 1827, Bory de Saint-Vincent had chosen the hair as
the chief test in race-classification, and divided mankind into the
_Leiotrichi_, or straight-haired, and the _Ulotrichi_, or
woolly-haired—a nomenclature afterwards adopted by Professor Huxley
(1870).[72] But Bory de Saint-Vincent’s classification was robbed of
permanent scientific value by his inclusion as distinct races of such
vague abstractions as “Scythians,” “Neptunians,” and “Columbians.”
Footnote 72:
_Journ. Eth. Soc._ (N.S.), II.
[Sidenote: =Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.=]
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1858) distributed his eleven principal
races primarily according to the character of the hair, sub-divided
according to the flatness or projection of the nose, skin-colour, the
shape of the skull, and the character of the face.[73]
Footnote 73:
_Cf._ Topinard, 1885, p. 264.
[Sidenote: =Haeckel.=]
Professor Ernst Haeckel adopted the following classification from
Friedrich Müller:—I. Ulotriches (woolly-haired). _A._ Lophokomoi
(tufted): Papuans, Hottentots; _B._ Eriokomoi (fleecy): Kafirs, Negroes.
II. Lissotriches (lank-haired). _A._ Euthykomoi (straight): Malay,
Mongol, American, Arctic, Australian; _B._ Euplokomoi (curly): Dravidas,
Nubians, Mediterranean.
[Sidenote: =Broca, Topinard.=]
Broca and Topinard (1885) have three main classes—Straight, Wavy or
Curly, and Woolly—sub-divided first by head-form, then by skin colour.
Many of the earlier classifications were based on insufficient or
erroneous evidence, and the general tendency has been to increase the
divisions as the physical characters of the populations of the earth
became gradually better known. Thus the twelve races of Haeckel in 1873
had advanced to thirty-four in 1879; the sixteen of Topinard in 1878 had
grown to nineteen in 1885; and the thirteen races and thirty
sub-divisions of Deniker in 1889 were increased in 1900 to seventeen
groups, containing twenty-nine races.
[Sidenote: =Flower.=]
Sir William Flower (1831-1899), a distinguished zoologist and
physical anthropologist, in 1885[74] adopted the old three-fold
classification:—I. Ethiopian, Negroid, or Melanian. _A._ African or
typical Negroes; _B._ Hottentots and Bushmen; _C._ Oceanic Negroes
or Melanesians; _D._ Negritos. II. Mongolian or Xanthous. _A._
Eskimo; _B._ Typical Mongolian (including the Mongolo-Altaic and the
Southern Mongolian groups); _C._ Malay; _D._ Brown Polynesians or
Malayo-Polynesians; _E._ American Indians (excluding the Eskimo).
III. Caucasian or “White.” _A._ Xanthochroi; _B._ Melanochroi. As
Flower himself says, this scheme of classification, “in its broad
outlines, scarcely differs from that proposed by Cuvier nearly sixty
years ago.... Still it can only be looked upon as an approximation.”
Although he places skin-colour first, he tacitly admits its
insufficiency as a main diagnostic character, and his three groups
coincide with a classification based on the nature of the hair.
Footnote 74:
_Journ. Anth. Inst._, xiv., pp. 378-393.
[Sidenote: =Deniker.=]
Among the later classifications a new tendency may be noted. The earlier
schemes aimed at producing a series of water-tight compartments into
which the races of the globe could be isolated. Further research,
however, encouraged the growing conviction that a pure race is
practically non-existent, and a different method had to be followed.
This is described by Deniker (p. 284): “Taking into account all the new
data of anthropological science, I endeavoured, as do the botanists, to
form natural groups by combining the different characters (colour of the
skin, nature of the hair, stature, form of the head, of the nose,
etc.).” This results in the formation of seventeen ethnic groups,
containing twenty-nine races, and these are ingeniously arranged (p.
289) in a two-dimensional grouping, to show their affinities, which is a
modification of his suggestive earlier scheme.[75]
Footnote 75:
_Bull. Soc. d’Anth._, 1889.
The “pigeon-hole” system of classification had, however, been
discredited in the fourth edition of Prichard’s _Natural History of
Man_, edited and enlarged by Edwin Norris (1855), since on p. 644 it is
stated:—
The different races of men are not distinguished from each other
by strongly-marked, uniform, and permanent distinctions, as are
the several species belonging to any given tribe of animals. All
the diversities which exist are variable, and pass into each
other by insensible gradations; and there is, moreover, scarcely
an instance in which the actual transition cannot be proved to
have taken place.
This is practically the same result at which Waitz arrived in 1863.
[Sidenote: =Keane.=]
Professor Keane (1895, p. 228), though returning to the four-fold
grouping proposed by Linnæus, uses these divisions to represent, not
actual varieties or races, but “ideal types,” differentiated by somatic
characters, and also by language, religion, and temperament. “Although
man had but one origin, one pliocene precursor [Pithecanthropus], men
had several separate places of origin, several pleistocene precursors.
In our family tree four such precursors are assumed.” From each “ideal
type” he traces the development of the present varieties arranged in the
scheme of the family tree.
[Sidenote: =Man’s Place in Nature.=]
Since the time of Linnæus it has been recognised that a place for man
must be found in classification of animals; and he was naturally put at
the top of the tree. The main question, however, was his exact
relationship to the higher apes. Linnæus (p. 90) included man and apes
in the Primates, one of his seven orders of Mammalia. Cuvier divided the
Mammifères into nine groups, man being included in the Bimanes, and apes
and monkeys in the Quadrumanes. The most noteworthy attempt to put man
in his place was made when Huxley published his _Evidence as to Man’s
Place in Nature_ (1863), based on lectures given in 1860, in which he
proved that man was more nearly allied to the higher apes than the
latter were to the lower monkeys. Concerning this book, he wrote to Mr.
E. Clodd, thirty years later, “that a very shrewd friend of mine [Sir
William Lawrence[76]] implored me not to publish, as it would certainly
ruin all my prospects.”[77] Doubtless one reason why Huxley wrote the
book was to impress on the public that the evolution of man as an animal
is perfectly comparable with that of other mammals, since Darwin only
hinted in his _Origin of Species_ (1859) that “Light will be thrown on
the origin of man and his history” (p. 488). His silence, he confesses
in the Introduction to the _Descent of Man_ (1871), was due to desire
“not to add to the prejudices against his views.” Professor Haeckel
fully discussed his views concerning the genealogy of man in 1868,[78]
and several times subsequently.
Footnote 76:
In the Preface to the 1894 edition Huxley writes: “It was not so very
long since my kind friend Sir William Lawrence, one of the ablest men
whom I have known, had been well-nigh ostracised for his book _On
Man_, which now might be read in a Sunday-school without surprising
anybody.”
Footnote 77:
_Folk-Lore_, VI., 1895, p. 67, _f.n._
Footnote 78:
_Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte._
[Sidenote: =Vogt.=]
Carl Vogt (1864), who, like so many other zoologists then and since, was
led to study anthropology, pointed out that “the ape-type does not
culminate in one, but in three, anthropoid apes.” On examining the
species of mankind and their history, he arrived at similar results (see
also p. 66).
In the second volume of his _Generelle Morphologie_ (1866) Haeckel
applied the theory of evolution to the whole organic kingdom, including
man, and drew up the first “genealogical trees.” This attempt was
improved and treated in a more popular form in his _Natural History of
Creation_ (1868), and again in the _Evolution of Man_ (1879), an
enlarged edition of which was published in 1905.
There is now a practical agreement among zoologists and anthropologists
that man is included in one of several families that constitute the
sub-order Anthropoidea of the order Primates.
As has previously been mentioned, the discovery of _Pithecanthropus_
raised great discussions, some of which were concerning the exact
position of man with regard to the various higher apes. It is now
generally admitted that _Pithecanthropus_ may be regarded as a member of
a separate family of the Anthropoidea, the Pithecanthropidæ, between the
Simiidæ and the Hominidæ. The re-examination of the previously known
skulls of palæolithic age, and the discovery of fresh specimens in
recent years, have re-opened the question whether the genus Homo
contains more than the one species, _H. Sapiens_. Duckworth[79] (1904)
has given a careful summary of the morphological characters of the
Neanderthal, Spy, and Krapina remains, and states as his opinion that
“the individuals thus characterised are associated in a group
specifically distinct from the modern Hominidæ, to which the name Homo
primigenius or Homo neanderthalensis has been applied.”[80]
Footnote 79:
_L.c._ pp. 520-542; _cf._ also _Man_, 1902, p. 186.
Footnote 80:
See also W. J. Sollas, _Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc._, B. 199, 1907, p. 281.
Those authors who describe and classify the various races and peoples of
mankind at the same time indicate their geographical distribution, and
in some instances notify some of the shiftings and migrations that have
taken place. Many maps have been prepared to illustrate the human
distribution in whole or in part, and these are to be found in various
memoirs and books. An atlas such as Dr. G. Gerland’s _Atlas der
Völkerkunde_ (1892) summarises a vast amount of information.
Our knowledge is very imperfect concerning the movements of mankind.
Historical records give some information on the subject. A certain
amount has been gleaned from traditional sources, but doubtless much
more remains to be garnered. The spoils of the archæologist afford
important data, but there are immense tracts of country which are yet
totally unexplored, or very imperfectly investigated. All shiftings of
peoples are mainly controlled by climatic and geographical conditions;
but these are continually varying, and it is the business of the
geographer and geologist to indicate what these have probably been at
various periods since the appearance of man on this earth. It is not too
much to say that, when maps have been prepared which indicate these
various changes, great light will be thrown upon the early history of
mankind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII.
ETHNOLOGY: ITS SCOPE AND SOURCES
[Sidenote: =Definition.=]
“ETHNOLOGY” is a term which is often loosely used as synonymous with
“Anthropology,” to cover the whole field of the science of man. It was
in this sense that it first came into prominence, being chosen by M. W.
F. Edwards as the title for the _Société ethnologique de Paris_, in
1839. The society was concerned with what we should now call
Anthropology; but it was more especially interested in the origins and
relationships of the historical races of Europe, which was the
etymological justification for its name. The English Ethnological
Society, established in 1843, imitated the French title, and did much to
fix the vague and general interpretation of the word. Unfortunately,
Professor Tylor, first and foremost of English ethnologists, seems
purposely to avoid the use of the word in his _Primitive Culture_, which
he refers to as “rational ethnography.” But, with the development of the
subject, its scope became gradually more defined, until it is now
generally restricted to the comparative and genetic study of human
culture and of man as a social animal.
The materials for the study of ethnology have been always with us, but
the study itself is of very recent development, and almost alone among
the sciences can reckon its founders among the living. Professor J. L.
Myres gives excellent reasons for this “late adolescence” in his opening
address at the meeting of the British Association at Winnipeg, 1909:—
Anthropology ... gathers its data from all longitudes, and
almost all latitudes, on this earth. It was necessary,
therefore, that the study of man should lag behind the rest of
the sciences, so long as any large masses of mankind remained
withdrawn from its view; and we have only to remember that
Australia and Africa were not even crossed at all—much less
explored—by white men, until within living memory, to realise
what this limitation means. In addition to this, modern Western
civilisation, when it did at last come into contact with
aboriginal peoples in new continents, too often came, like the
religion which it professed, bringing “not peace, but a sword.”
The customs and institutions of alien people have been viewed
too often, even by reasonable and good men, simply as “y^e
beastlie devices of y^e heathen,” and the pioneers of our
culture, perversely mindful only of the narrower creed, that “he
that is not with us is against us,” have set out to civilise
savages by wrecking the civilisation which they had (pp.
589-590).
[Sidenote: =Sources.=]
There are, as Professor Myres points out, two kinds of anthropologists:—
There is an anthropologist to whom we go for our facts: the
painful accurate observer of data, the storehouse of infinite
detail; sometimes himself the traveller and explorer, by cunning
speech or wiser silence opening the secrets of aboriginal
hearts; sometimes the middleman, the broker of traveller’s
winnings, insatiate after some new thing, unerring by instinct
rather than by experience, to detect false coin, to disinter the
pearl of great price.... To him we go for our facts....
And there is an anthropologist to whom we look for our light.
His learning may be fragmentary, as some men count learning; his
memory faulty; his inaccuracy beyond dispute; his inconsistency
the one consistent thing about him. But with shattered and
ricketty instruments he attains results; heedless of epicycles,
disrespectful to the equator, he bequeaths his paradoxes to be
demonstrated by another generation of men. He may not know, or
reason, perhaps; but he has learnt to see; and what he sees he
says (1908, p. 124).
[Sidenote: =Herodotus.=]
In the earliest times Herodotus may be cited as one of the most
distinguished names in the former of the two groups, and Lucretius in
the latter. The writings of Herodotus (_circa_ 480-425 B.C.) are a
veritable storehouse of information, from the highest civilisations down
to the veriest savagery, and his work has lost none of its freshness or
value through lapse of time. As a matter of fact, modern investigations
carried out in the areas treated of by him more frequently confirm and
exemplify than refute his statements.
[Sidenote: =Lucretius.=]
Lucretius (99 or 98-55 B.C.), the poet, teacher, and reformer, boldly
declared that there was no Golden Age from which man has degenerated,
but that his progress has continually been slowly upward from a
condition of pure savagery:—
Arms of old were hands nails and teeth and stones and boughs
broken off from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon as they
had become known. Afterwards the force of iron and copper was
discovered; and the use of copper was known before that of iron,
as its nature is easier to work and it is found in greater
quantity. With copper they would labour the soil of the earth,
with copper stir up the billows of war.... Then by slow steps
the sword of iron gained ground and the make of the copper
sickle became a byword; and with iron they began to plough
through the earth’s soil, and the struggles of wavering war were
rendered equal.[81]
Footnote 81:
Lucretius, _On the Nature of Things_. Translated by H. A. J. Munro.
Bohn’s edition, 1908, p. 214.
It is evident from his poems that Lucretius was a keen observer and a
philosopher, who summed up existing Epicurean knowledge; and we are
justified in believing that these particular generalisations were based
upon tales told by travellers in distant lands, and upon traditional
lore, which, with the exception of the recently acquired archæological
evidence, is practically all upon which we have to rely. The philosophic
poet apprehended the significance of various facts, and welded them into
a consistent theory of the development of culture, and thereby earned
the honour of being the first evolutionary anthropologist.
[Sidenote: =Strabo.=]
Nor should we overlook the versatile Strabo (_circa_ 63 B.C.-21 A.D.),
who was interested in many things, from climate to botany, and from
sport to Druidism and Brahmanism. Alexander von Humboldt considered that
he surpassed all other geographical labourers of antiquity by the
diversity of the subject and the grandeur of the composition. His
_Geography_ contains much information on the early history and
traditions of numerous peoples, their character, dress, dwellings, and
mode of life.
In the writings of the earlier travellers (to mention but three
names)—Marco Polo, in Cathay (1254-1323), Ibn Batuta (1304-1377), in
Asia; and Joao de Barros (1496-1570), who was considered the greatest
authority on Portuguese, African, and Asiatic travels of his time—and in
the records of travels contained in collections such as those of Hakluyt
(1552-1616), Purchas (1577-1626), and Pinkerton (1758-1826), much
ethnological information can be sifted from among the marvellous tales.
Sometimes the marvellous tales themselves can, by ethnology, be
interpreted in fact, as when the “tailed men” of the Nicobars are found
to owe their origin to the tail-like method of wearing the
loin-cloth.[82] These were followed by the travellers and explorers of
the nineteenth century, who brought back a vast amount of new
information, both physical and cultural, from the lands they visited.
Among these the names of Admiral Byron, James Bruce, L. A. Bougainville,
Sir John Barrow, Captain Cook, de Lesseps, and Pallas may be mentioned.
Footnote 82:
E. H. Man, _Journ. Anth. Inst._, xv., p. 442.
Other sources of information were the works of the Jesuit missionaries
of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, such as José d’Acosta
(1539-1600), J. F. Lafitau (1670-1740), and F. X. de Charlevoix
(1682-1761), who worked among the Canadian Indians, and M. Dobrizhoffer
(1717-1791).
Next come the missionaries of the nineteenth century, such as William
Ellis (1794-1872), who laboured in South Africa and Madagascar, but is
best known for his work in Polynesia; John Williams (1796-1839); George
Turner (1818-1891); W. Wyatt Gill (1828-1896), and others who also
worked in the Pacific. In Africa we may mention Bishop Callaway
(1817-1890) and David Livingstone (1813-1873). At the same time the
Roman Catholic missionary E. R. Huc (1813-1860) was working in China and
Tartary, while the Abbé Dubois (1770-1848) was laboriously investigating
the manners, customs, and ceremonies of the Hindus.
Besides the missionaries, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the early
explorers and civil servants in all parts of the world, who have
provided, consciously or unconsciously, a vast amount of information
about the peoples among whom they travelled or over whom they ruled.
Scientific expeditions, even before these were undertaken in the
interests of anthropology, collected further material. Lastly come the
various anthropological expeditions, consisting of trained workers, who,
besides amassing fresh evidence, check, correct, or amplify the work of
earlier writers.
These were the data on which the science of Ethnology, in its restricted
sense, was to be built. The earliest ethnologists utilised the material
mainly with a view to elucidating ethnic relationships, and to producing
systematic classifications of the various races of mankind. Later
workers such as Ratzel and Reclus produced systematic descriptions of
races, peoples, and areas. A third method was that of Tylor, the chief
exponent of Comparative Ethnology.
[Sidenote: =Systematic Works on Ethnology.=]
The earlier attempts at race classification were based merely on
physical characters, and are dealt with elsewhere (Chap. VI.). During
the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries geographical
discovery brought a mass of new facts to light, especially in the realm
of natural history; and in no branch of that science were the effects so
marked as in that of Anthropology.
The marshalling of a vast array of new observations and deductions
required a broad mind, wide knowledge, and shrewd reasoning powers.
These, together with a sound training in anatomy, an unusual
acquaintance with philology, and some eminence in psychology, produced
the monumental work of Prichard.
[Illustration:
J. C. PRICHARD.
]
[Sidenote: =Prichard.=]
James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) showed, when a boy, a remarkable
aptness for foreign languages. He was never sent to school, but was
taught by various tutors, from whom he learnt Latin, Greek, French,
Italian, and Spanish. His father, a merchant, and member of the Society
of Friends, lived for a time in Bristol, and there the boy began his
practical study of anthropology, spending his time by the docks,
watching the foreign sailors, and chatting with them in their own
tongues. Later on he chose medicine for his profession, less on account
of any special liking for it than because it afforded him opportunities
for indulging his anthropological tastes. His first contribution to the
science was his thesis for the degree of Doctor of Medicine in the
University of Edinburgh, which was entitled _De generis humani
varietate_, published in 1813 in an expanded form as _Researches into
the Physical History of Man_. It was still further expanded in 1826, and
a five-volume edition was issued between 1836 and 1847. In 1843 appeared
another monumental work, _The Natural History of Man_, “comprising
inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on
the different tribes of the human family.”
Speaking of Prichard at the meeting of the British Association in
Bristol in 1875, Professor Rolleston remarked: “His works remain,
massive, impressive, enduring—much as the headlands along our southern
coast stand out in the distance in their own grand outlines, while a
close and minute inspection is necessary for the discernment of the
forts and fosses added to them—indeed, dug out of their substance in
recent times.” The services of Prichard in the field of Anthropology
have often been compared with those of his contemporary Blumenbach, by
whose fame during his lifetime he was overshadowed; but, though the
latter was unequalled on the side of physical anthropology, there is no
doubt that Prichard had a wider grasp of the subject, and his works
formed the cornerstones of Anthropology in England.
[Sidenote: =Other Generalisations.=]
While Prichard was expanding his thesis, Antoine Desmoulins was writing
his _Histoire naturelle des races humaines_, which appeared
contemporaneously with Prichard’s revised _Researches_ in 1826. He
attempted to discover the origins and relations of the peoples of
north-east Europe, north and east Asia, and South Africa, by the
evidence of archæology, physiology, anatomy, and linguistics.
The work of systematising the mass of anthropological data and producing
an orderly scheme must always be regarded as an almost superhuman task,
and those who have attempted it deserve our grateful recognition.
The next Englishman after Prichard was Latham, who published his
_Natural History of the Varieties of Man_ in 1850 (the same year as
Knox’s _Races of Man_), and his _Descriptive Ethnology_ in 1859. In the
latter year appeared the first instalment of the _Anthropologie der
Naturvölker_ of Waitz, the six volumes of which were completed in 1872—a
work which largely assisted in laying a secure foundation for the new
science. In 1873 Friedrich Müller published his _Allgemeine
Ethnographie_. The following year saw the publication of Peschel’s
_Völkerkunde_. Ratzel’s great work, _Völkerkunde_, appeared in 1885-88.
In America Pickering’s _Races of Man_ was published in 1848, and Nott
and Gliddon’s _Indigenous Races of the Earth_ in 1857. Paul Topinard’s
_L’Anthropologie_ (1876) is mentioned elsewhere (p. 38).
The earlier of these generalisations were composed before the acceptance
of the theory of evolution, in the new light of which all biological
sciences had to start afresh, and all were written before the masses of
new material collected by ethnologists and archæologists, working in the
field, had brought so much fresh evidence to bear upon the whole
geographical and historical aspect of man that it was impossible “to see
the wood for the trees.” Thus the time for synthesis had arrived, and
with the hour came the man. A. H. Keane’s _Ethnology_ appeared in 1896,
to be followed by his _Man, past and present_ in 1899. J. Deniker’s _Les
races et les peuples de la terre_, together with the English
translation, appeared in the following year.
[Sidenote: =Ethnology and the Classics.=]
In summarising the sources from which the materials for the science of
ethnology are derived, stress must be laid on the contributions from
classic authors. No student can afford to neglect the histories, annals,
poems, and sacred books of the ancients, whether African, European, or
Asiatic. Professor J. L. Myres (1908) has pointed out that
anthropological investigations and speculations were already afoot in
the fifth century B.C. and before, and has outlined the ethnological
problems concerning man, his origin and relationships, and the questions
connected with his social life that interested and puzzled the ancient
Greek world. Not only Herodotus, but other writers, show that these
problems were thoroughly familiar to the Greeks. Long before Herodotus,
Hesiod refers to a standard scheme of archæology, in which Ages of Gold,
Silver, and Bronze succeed each other; primitive man is described as a
forest dweller growing no corn, but subsisting on acorns and beech mast;
Anaximander and Archelaus have suggestions to solve the mystery of man’s
origin, Anaximander taking an “almost Darwinian outlook”[83] of the
animal kingdom; Æschylus distinguishes the tribes of men by culture,
noting the differences in their dress and equipments, religious
observances and language.
Footnote 83:
This statement is criticised by E. E. Sikes in _Folk-Lore_, xx., 1909,
p. 424.
The chief value of the Greeks to the ethnologist is that they were
collectors of material. Some of their theories have been substantiated,
but they arrived at conclusions by deduction rather than by induction.
Thus in many ways anthropology owes a deep debt of gratitude to the
classics. It was not until recently that this debt began to be repaid.
Within the last twenty or thirty years there has been an increasing
recognition of the value of anthropological studies in the elucidation
of the classics; and this healthy movement is mainly associated with the
name of Professor William Ridgeway, of Cambridge, who devoted his
presidential address before the Royal Anthropological Institute, in
1909, to this subject.
In 1887 Professor Ridgeway proceeded to apply the comparative method to
Greek coins and weights in a paper called the “Homeric Talent: Its
Origin and Affinities.”[84] He there tried to show that the origin of
coined money among the Lydians, and its evolution by the Greeks and
Italians, entirely accorded with the evolution of primitive money from
the use of objects such as axes, ornaments, cattle, and so forth.
Footnote 84:
_Hellenic Journal_, VIII., p. 133; see also _The Origin of Metallic
Currency_, 1892.
One of the relations of Ethnology to other branches of the Humanities
which hitherto has received scant acknowledgment is its influence on the
course of Political Science. Professor J. L. Myres recently gave a
brilliant address on this subject at Winnipeg, in which he points out
how Bodin (1530-1596), Edward Grimstone (1615), Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Montesquieu (1689-1755), Rousseau
(1712-1778), Voltaire (1694-1778), Herder (1744-1803), and others,
referred to or utilised the accounts of natives by travellers to
illustrate their theories of statecraft.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII.
THE HISTORY OF ARCHÆOLOGICAL DISCOVERY
[Sidenote: =Prehistoric Man.=]
DR. JOHNSON was not in advance of his time in anthropological matters.
While he was gibing at Lord Monboddo for his belief in man’s simian
affinities, he was also making a pronouncement on the subject of
prehistoric archæology that later discoveries were soon to disprove. Up
to his time history was content to start from the earliest written
documents, supplemented, now and then, by the evidence of coins and
inscriptions; and Dr. Johnson summed up contemporary opinion in his
statement, “All that is really known of the ancient state of Britain is
contained in a few pages. We can know no more than what old writers have
told us.”
But it was not long before it was recognised that there was other
evidence besides that of the “old writers,” evidence the nature of which
has been well described by Sir W. R. Wilde:—
We possess what cannot be falsified by the scribe, and, although
styled prehistoric, they are far more truthfully historical than
the writing that no doubt was largely interfered with, and
which, if old, now requires a gloss to interpret it. The grassy
mound or circle, the stones erected into a cromleach, the great
sepulchral mound, the cinerary urn, the stone weapon or tool,
the grain-rubber for triturating cereal food, the harpoon for
spearing fish, the copper and bronze tools and weapons, and the
gold ornaments of the most early tribes—all are now, in their
way, far more truthful than anything that could have been
committed to writing, even if there were letters in that day.
They are litanies in stone, dogmata in metal, and sermons
preaching from the grassy mound.[85]
Footnote 85:
Brit. Ass., Belfast, 1874.
Much of this evidence already existed, but even when rightly interpreted
it was for a long time ignored and scoffed at. It has been noted in the
life-history of a scientific truth, “People first say, ‘It is not true,’
then that ‘It is contrary to religion,’ and lastly that ‘Everybody knew
it before.’” The first attitude of incredulity was to a great extent
justified by the doubtful character of the earlier finds, many of which
later investigation has had to reject or to hold in suspense as “not
proven.” The second stage was more serious, and for a long time the new
science was hampered by the accusation of irreligion. But
“Anthropology,” as Huxley pointed out, “has nothing to do with the truth
or falsehood of religion.” “_Je suis naturaliste_,” said Abbé Bourgeois,
“_je ne fais pas de théologie_.”
Gradually the accumulated evidence became too insistent to be ignored.
The work of various archæologists in Denmark, the explorations of caves
and lake dwellings in Britain and on the Continent, and the patient
labours of Boucher de Perthes in the Somme Valley, all gave proof of the
existence of prehistoric man, and the science of prehistoric archæology
was established.
[Sidenote: =Flint Implements.=]
Long before this time, as far back as the sixteenth century, flint
implements had been discovered in various parts, and proved as great a
puzzle as the fossils which perplexed and tried the faith of the earlier
geologists.
The uncultured folk of Europe recognised that the chipped arrow-heads
which occasionally occur on the surface of the ground were the
implements of an alien people, as the names “elf darts” and “fairy
darts” imply. The country folk in the more backward districts believe
that fairies still exist; but better informed intelligent people believe
they are purely mythological, while students are aware that these
arrow-heads were the implements of earlier populations, who are classed
in folk-memory under the generic term of “fairies.”
Typical neolithic implements, such as stone adze and axe heads, had
attracted the attention of writers in the Middle Ages, such as Gesner
and Agricola, who, as Sir John Evans[86] informs us, regarded them as
thunder-bolts—a belief which is still widely spread not only in Europe,
but over the greater portion of the Old World. But Mercati, physician to
Clement VIII. at the end of the sixteenth century, appears to have been
the first to maintain that what were regarded as thunderbolts were the
arms of a primitive people unacquainted with the use of bronze or iron.
Certain later writers, as de Boot (1636) and la Peyrère (1655), also
regarded them as of human workmanship. Buffon, too, in 1778, declared
the “thunder-stones” to be the work of primeval man.
Footnote 86:
_Ancient Stone Implements_, 1872; 2nd ed. 1897, chap. iii.
In 1797 John Frere found numerous flint implements at a depth of about
twelve feet in some clay pits at Hoxne, Suffolk, and referred them to “a
very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world, and to
a people who had not the use of metals.”[87]
Footnote 87:
_Archæologia_, xiii., p. 204.
But the discovery does not seem to have attracted any interest, or
raised any discussion; and the Hoxne implements lay unnoticed for more
than half a century, until Evans, returning from Amiens and Abbeville in
1859, recognised the importance of the collections, and by further
excavations proved their antiquity.
The belief of the Middle Ages, that everything inexplicable was the work
of the Devil, was succeeded by an ascription of all objects of unknown
antiquity to the Druids or the Romans; but to neither of these could be
attributed the finds which were being made at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in the Danish kitchen-middens and dolmens, in the
Swiss lake dwellings, and in the caves and gravels of Britain and of
France. Still many years were to pass, and many heated discussions were
to be held, before archæology came to be recognised as an ally of
anthropology, and Prehistoric Man obtained credence.
[Sidenote: =Denmark.=]
In this new science Denmark took the lead. In 1806 a Commission was
appointed to make a scientific investigation into the history, natural
history, and geology of the country; and among the first problems to be
met with were the dolmens and shell-mounds, abounding in stone
implements, which found no period in Danish history capable of
accommodating them. History and the sagas were searched in vain.
Meanwhile more and more of these prehistoric implements were brought to
light. A new Commission was appointed, and the various sites were
carefully examined. The collection of Professor R. Nyerup formed, in
1810, the nucleus which, in 1816, expanded into the Royal Danish Museum
of Antiquities at Copenhagen, now, as the National Museum, lodged in the
Princessen Palace. C. J. Thomsen held the post of curator from 1816 to
1865. He ordered, arranged, and classified the collections, dividing the
objects according to their epoch of culture, and setting them in
chronological order, establishing the sequence of the Stone, Bronze, and
Iron Ages. This was the first attempt to classify the archæological
contents of a museum on a chronological basis, and it was continued,
elaborated, and developed by his successor, Professor J. J. A. Worsaae,
1865 to 1885.[88]
Footnote 88:
The classification itself was not new; it had been adumbrated by many
writers. See Evans, 1872, pp. 3 ff.
[Sidenote: =Caves.=]
Another class of evidence which was of great importance in determining
the pre-history of man was that derived from the caves. The beginnings
of cave-exploration are described by Professor Boyd Dawkins:—
The dread of the supernatural, which preserved the European
caves from disturbance, was destroyed in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries by the search after “ebur fossile,” or
unicorn’s horn, which ranked high in the materia medica of those
days as a specific for many diseases, and which was obtained, in
great abundance, in the caverns of the Hartz, and in those of
Hungary and Franconia. As the true nature of the drug gradually
revealed itself, the German caves became famous for the remains
of the lions, hyænas, fossil elephants, and other strange
animals, which had been used for medicine.[89]
Footnote 89:
_Cave Hunting_, p. 11.
These caves were investigated mainly by geologists or palæontologists,
searching for evidence as to the extinct animals that formerly occupied
them. Indications of the presence of man were unsuspected, and, if
found, disregarded. Thus much of the evidence of man’s early history was
doubtless unwittingly destroyed.
The Franconian caves were explored towards the end of the eighteenth
century, and described by Esper (1774), Rosenmüller (1804), and Dr.
Goldfuss (1810). The most famous of these was the cave of Gailenreuth.
Here, for the first time, investigations were carried out
systematically, the finds classified, and, since they indicated the
co-existence of man and extinct mammals, theories as to their
significance and derivation filled the air.
In 1861 William Buckland (1784-1856), Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford
(afterwards Dean of Westminster), visited the caves, and kindled that
interest in cave-exploration which was to produce such remarkable
results in England.
[Sidenote: =Oreston.=]
In the same year the first bone-cave systematically explored in the
country was discovered at Oreston, near Plymouth, and the deposits
proved the former existence of the rhinoceros in that region.
[Sidenote: =Kirkdale.=]
More famous was the exploration of the Kirkdale Cave, near Helmsley, in
Yorkshire, discovered in 1821, in a limestone quarry, and investigated
and described by Dr. Buckland.[90] He found remains of the broken and
gnawed bones of the rhinoceros, mammoth, stag, bison, etc., which had
been the prey of the hyænas inhabiting the cave, and he traced their
origin to a universal deluge. Subsequently he examined the remains from
other caves, and summarised his conclusions in _Reliquiæ Diluvianæ_,
published in 1824. Dr. Buckland was henceforward the acknowledged
authority on bone caves and their contents, and to his disbelief in the
contemporaneous existence of man with the cave animals may be traced
much of the incredulity with which all evidence of early man in Britain
was received for more than a generation.
Footnote 90:
_Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc._, 1882.
So far but few traces of man’s presence in the caves had been detected,
and, when found, had generally been explained away as later intrusions,
though human occupations had been proved in Franconia, in the French
caves explored by MM. Tournai de Christol and Marcel de Serres in the
south of France in 1828, and later by the discoveries of Dr. Schmerling
in the caves of Liège about 1832.
[Sidenote: =Liège.=]
From the forty caves examined Dr. Schmerling found not only bones of
extinct animals, but also a few human bones, and a large number of bone
and flint implements and flakes, which he attributed to human
workmanship. Unfortunately, these discoveries were discredited both by
Dr. Buckland and Sir Charles Lyell, but have since been fully
substantiated by Dr. E. Dupont.[91]
Footnote 91:
_Les Temps Antéhist. en Belgique_, 1871.
[Sidenote: =Kent’s Cavern.=]
The most important of all the cave explorations in England is that of
Kent’s Cavern, Torquay. This cavern was known from time immemorial; but
the first investigation recorded was that of Mr. Northmore, of Cleeve,
Exeter, who visited it in 1824, in expectation of finding evidence of
the worship of Mithras.
The next year he returned there again, accompanied by the Rev. J.
MacEnery, the Roman Catholic chaplain at Tor Abbey, whose name will
always be honourably connected with the explorations of the cave. He was
not a geologist or a palæontologist, but to him fell the distinction of
discovering the first flint implement ever found in unmistakable
association with remains of extinct animals. On another occasion he
visited the cave together with Mr. Northmore and Dr. Buckland. “Nothing
remarkable was discovered that day, excepting the tooth of a rhinoceros
and a flint blade. This was the first instance of the occurrence of
British relics being noticed in this or, I believe, any other cave. Both
these relics it was my good fortune to find.”
He subsequently found many other flint implements, but Dr. Buckland was
not convinced that they occurred in an undisturbed area. He believed
that the ancient Britons had scooped out ovens in the stalagmite, and
that through them the flint implements had reached their position in the
cave earth. In 1846 the Torquay Natural History Society appointed a
committee of investigation, consisting of Pengelly and two others, who
confirmed MacEnery’s discovery of flint implements in conjunction with
extinct animals. Nevertheless, their evidence was not accepted. In
Pengelly’s words: “The scientific world ... told us that our statements
were impossible, and we simply responded with the remark that we had not
said they were possible, only that they were true.”[92]
Footnote 92:
_Kent’s Cavern_, 1876. Lecture delivered at Glasgow (1875).
[Sidenote: =Lake Dwellings.=]
Before chronicling the final triumph of the cave explorers in 1859, we
may briefly note another series of investigations which was being
carried on at the same time, and which also shared in the work of
throwing light on the shadowy figure of prehistoric man. This was the
excavation of crannogs and lake dwellings.
[Sidenote: =Irish Crannogs.=]
In 1839 Sir W. R. Wilde explored some of the Irish crannogs, or
semi-artificial islands, usually made of layers of stone, logs, sticks
(the so-called fascine dwellings), resting on _cluans_ or islets in the
Irish lakes. The first crannog explored was that at Lagore, famous in
ancient times as Loch Gobhair, near Dunshaughlin, co. Meath, and
mentioned in the _Annals of the Four Masters_ as having been plundered
in the ninth and tenth centuries. It was originally discovered by
accident. Some labourers, when clearing out a stream in the
neighbourhood, came across very numerous bones, and also a vast
collection of objects of all descriptions, warlike and domestic, made of
stone, bone, wood, bronze, and iron, and a few human remains.
The next crannog to be disclosed was one in Roughan Lake, near
Dungannon; and thereafter more and more came to light, until in 1857
forty-six had been recorded.
The crannog finds, and the depth of the deposits, indicated great age;
and Sir William Wilde at once recognised their significance in
determining the history of early human occupation in the island. This
evidence was strengthened by the discoveries shortly afterwards made in
Switzerland.
[Sidenote: =Swiss Pile-Dwellings.=]
These were also partly the result of an accident. The winter of 1853-4
happened to be particularly cold and dry, and in consequence tracts of
the shores of the Swiss lakes, which were normally covered by water,
stood bare and dry. The inhabitants of Ober Meilen, near Zürich, took
advantage of this to enclose part of the foreshore, building walls, and
filling the reclaimed space with mud. During the necessary excavations
various remains came to light, stumps of piles, stone and horn
implements, etc. Dr. Ferdinand Keller, President of the Antiquarian
Society at Zürich, hearing of these discoveries, hastened to explore the
newly-revealed area. Fishermen had long before reported on the existence
of a submerged forest, the stumps of which caught their fishing nets and
spoilt the fishing on the sloping shores. In 1829, during excavations,
some piles were found, but, being attributed to the Romans, no further
notice was taken of them. Dr. Keller discovered that the “submerged
forest” was in reality of human origin, formed of sharpened and pointed
piles, driven into the ground at regular intervals, and he recognised
here evidences of prehistoric human occupation, corresponding with that
recently proved for Denmark. Pile dwellings were subsequently discovered
in the lakes of Biel, Sempach, Neufchatel, Geneva, and Wallenstad,
though investigations were only carried out in Biel and Zürich. These
yielded animal remains, numerous stone implements, pottery, a skull,
parts of several skeletons, and one piece of bronze.
At first the evidence was merely ignored, then it was listened to, but
discredited, or various ingenious explanations were made to explain it
away.
But gradually the accumulated evidence became too insistent to be
ignored, and was supported by too great names to be neglected. The caves
of the Mendips, explored by Williams and Beard, of North and South
Wales, explored by Stanley, of Yorkshire and of Devonshire, the crannogs
of Ireland and the pile dwellings of Switzerland, all told the same
tale.
[Sidenote: =Brixham.=]
The turning point was reached in 1858. During that year a new cave had
been discovered while excavating for building foundations at Brixham, on
the shores of Torbay, Mr. Pengelly persuaded the owner to grant him a
refusal of the lease of the virgin site, and it was submitted to a most
careful examination. Thirty-six rude flint implements were discovered in
association with the remains of hyænas, cave, brown and grizzly bears,
woolly rhinoceros and mammoth, in undisturbed red loam beneath a layer
of stalagmite.
This was conclusive evidence. A paper read by Mr. Pengelly at the
meeting of the British Association at Leeds, 1858, and supported by such
authorities as Charles Lyell, Ramsey, Prestwich,[93] Owen, and others,
clinched the argument, and the contemporary existence of man with
Pleistocene fauna was firmly established.
Footnote 93:
“It was not until I had myself witnessed the conditions under which
these flint implements had been found at Brixham that I became fully
impressed with the validity of the doubts thrown upon the previously
prevailing opinions with respect to such remains in caves.”—Prestwich,
_Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc._, 1860.
It was not long before the same concession of the antiquity of man was
reached on the Continent.
[Sidenote: =Boucher de Perthes.=]
Boucher de Perthes, the son of a distinguished botanist, was early
attracted to the work of cave-exploration, and in 1805 and again in 1810
made discoveries of animal bones and of flint implements which he
recognised as the work of man. Later on, when extensive excavations for
fortifications and railroads were being carried on at Abbeville, he
found the same type of implement _in situ_, and in 1838 submitted some
of his discoveries and deductions to the Society of Emulation of
Abbeville, of which he was president. The next year he brought the same
evidence to Paris and showed his flints to several members of the
Institute. In 1847 he published a description of his finds. In 1855
Rigollot,[94] by his finds at Amiens, had confirmed the evidence
produced by Boucher de Perthes.
Footnote 94:
_Mémoire sur des Instruments en silex trouvés à St. Acheul près
Amiens._
In 1858 Hugh Falconer, the palæontologist, visited Abbeville to see the
collection of implements made by Boucher de Perthes, and “became
satisfied that there was a great deal of fair presumptive evidence in
favour of many of his speculations regarding the remote antiquity of
these industrial objects, and their association with animals now
extinct.”[95] Acting on Falconer’s suggestion, numerous geologists
visited Abbeville in the following year, including Sir Joseph Prestwich,
Sir John Evans, and Sir Charles Lyell; and Arthur J. Evans, then a boy
accompanying his father, had the good fortune to find one of the chipped
flints _in situ_. This established the horizon of the flints beyond
question, though there were still some who disputed the human
workmanship. The English archæologists and geologists however, had
already been convinced by the evidence of the Devonshire caves, and the
acceptance of “palæolithic man” on the Continent dates from their visit.
Footnote 95:
_Palæont. Mem._, ii., p. 597.
[Sidenote: =Subsequent Progress of Archæology.=]
Thenceforward archæology made greater progress abroad than in Great
Britain, mainly, perhaps, on account of the more numerous materials for
study.
[Sidenote: =France.=]
To indicate the share that France has had and maintains in the
elucidation of Prehistoric Anthropology, we have only to mention the
work of É. Lartet with Mr. Henry Christy on the French caves of Aurignac
(1861) and Périgord (1864); A. J. L. Bertrand and G. Bonstetten on
dolmens (1864, 1865, and 1879); É. Rivière on the Mentone caves (1873);
and the numerous works of E. Chantre, especially with regard to the
Rhone basin. These and others prepared the way for the classic work of
G. de Mortillet (1883), whose masterly summary and methodical treatment
of the subject have been of great service to all subsequent workers.
While recognising the labours of other investigators, special mention
must be made of Judge E. Piette (1827-1906), whose excavations in the
cave of Mas d’Azil constitute a landmark in such studies. Professor E.
Cartailhac, Dr. Capitan, and l’Abbé H. Breuil have done further service
in their investigations in French caves; and the two latter, in their
beautiful memoir on the cave of Altamira in North Spain, have further
demonstrated the wonderful artistic sense and technique of the
cave-dwellers during the later phases of Palæolithic times.
In Britain we may note the names of J. Barnard Davis, J. Thurnam,
Rolleston, Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Evans, Canon Greenwell, and
Professor Boyd Dawkins, whose standard works have largely helped to
mould the course of archæology in our own country.
In Germany, among the earlier writers may be mentioned C. Fuhlrott, L.
Lindenschmidt (1864-1881), J. A. Ecker (1865-1870), A. Lissauer, and,
above all, Rudolf Virchow, the author of numerous and valuable
contributions.
Elsewhere, G. Nicolucci studied prehistoric man in Italy, and during the
last thirty years the investigations of the illustrious Dr. Oskar
Montelius, of Stockholm, have been valued by all archæologists.
[Sidenote: =Tertiary Man.=]
Boucher de Perthes was the vindicator of Quaternary Man in France;
l’Abbé Bourgeois stands as the protagonist on behalf of Tertiary Man.
The first discovery of any traces of man’s existence during Tertiary
times was made in some sand and gravel quarries at Saint Prest, near
Chartres, by M. Desnoyers in 1863. He found various incised bones
bearing evidence of human workmanship, together with remains of _Elephas
meridionalis_ and _Rhinoceros leptorhinus_. But Sir Charles Lyell gave
it as his opinion, on examining the beds, that they were rather late
Quaternary than true Tertiary.
The whole question was hotly debated at the Second Congress of
Archæology and Prehistoric Anthropology at Paris, in 1867, where l’Abbé
Bourgeois (1819-1878), Professor of Philosophy at Blois, exhibited his
famous flint implements from Miocene beds at Thenay, near Tours,
Loir-et-Cher. These were undoubtedly Miocene beds, but it was open to
doubt if the implements were of human origin, and, if so, if they were
found in undisturbed positions. At the _Congrès International
d’Anthropologie_ at Brussels in 1872 a committee of fifteen was formed
to discuss the problem, and opinions were divided. Nine authorities
recognised human workmanship (one changed his opinion later); four
denied it; one was favourable, but with reserve; and one was unable to
decide at all. De Mortillet believed that they had not been made by man
himself, but by a semi-human precursor of man, which he named
_Homosimius Bourgeoisii_.
Other finds of Tertiary man, those of the Upper Miocene, by C. Ribeiro,
at Otta, in the Tagus Valley, 1860; of Tardy in the same year, and of
Rames in 1877, in beds of the same horizon at Puy-courny, Auvergne; of
Capellini, in Pliocene beds of Monte Aperto, near Siena, and of Fritz
Noetling in lower Pliocene beds in Burma, 1894, have none of them been
received without question, and are still classed by most authorities, as
by Sir John Evans in 1870, and again in 1897, as “Not proven.”
[Sidenote: =Eoliths.=]
Closely connected with the question of Tertiary Man is the “raging
vortex of the eolith controversy,” as Sollas describes it. Benjamin
Harrison, of Ightham, Kent, first drew attention to these rude chipped
flints, which he found in the chalk plateau, and claimed to be of
pre-glacial age, and of human origin. Prestwich accepted this view;
Evans rejected it, and anthropologists are still divided into opposite
camps on the question. Eoliths have since been discovered in various
parts of the world, and have merely served to confirm the respective
points of view of the partisans on either side.
Sollas, after summing up all the evidence, says: “When experts are thus
at variance nothing remains for the layman but to preserve an open
mind.” These discussions as to the existence of quaternary and Tertiary
man would have been settled once for all had actual undoubted human
bones been found in any of the beds, but this was rarely the case, and
disputants had to rely almost entirely on questionable artifacts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX.
TECHNOLOGY
THE history of that branch of Ethnology which is concerned with the
handicrafts of man is very brief. Specimens of the arts and crafts of
various races had long been collected in museums, and till recent years
they were little more than curiosities or trophies; but, owing to the
inspiration of General Pitt-Rivers, they are now proofs of stages in the
evolution of human thought or handicraft, or links in a chain of
scientific argument indicating the migrations or contacts of peoples.
[Sidenote: =Pitt-Rivers.=]
Augustus H. Lane-Fox (1827-1900) served with distinction in the Crimea.
In 1851 he began to collect specimens to illustrate his views. This, it
will be remembered, was eight years before the publication of the
_Origin of Species_. So Lane-Fox was to all intents and purposes a
pre-Darwinian evolutionist. Few men have had the collecting instinct so
strongly developed, but there was invariably some principle or theory
that the objects he collected were designed to illustrate. The spoils of
over twenty years of intelligent collecting were exhibited in 1874 in
the Bethnal Green Museum. The collection was a revelation to students,
and was the first application of the theory of evolution to objects made
by man. Colonel Lane-Fox succeeded to vast estates in Wiltshire and
Dorsetshire in 1880, and assumed the name of Pitt-Rivers. The following
year he commenced the series of excavations on his estate which are
models of scientific “digging.” The Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, and
that at Farnham in Dorsetshire, are fitting monuments of his genius. The
curator of the former museum, Mr. H. Balfour, is ably carrying on the
methods of Pitt-Rivers, and has made valuable investigations on the
evolution of musical and other implements.
Otis T. Mason (1838-1908), of the United States National Museum, paid
particular attention to the implements and processes of the technology
of backward peoples, more especially of the aborigines of North America;
and he was also interested in the wider aspects of human industrial
development.
Pitt-Rivers was certainly one of the first to demonstrate that patterns
and designs may be studied from the point of view of evolution; but he
did not make any detailed studies in this direction. The first
systematic treatise in this fascinating field of investigation was by
Dr. H. Colley March, who, in _The Meaning of Ornament_ (1889),[96]
utilised certain views put forward by Gottfried Semper in his valuable
book _Der Stil_ (1860-1863); but for over a decade the distinguished
Swedish archæologist and ethnologist, Dr. Hjalmar Stolpe (1841-1905),
had been amassing data to illustrate the evolution and distribution of
ornamentation, and he published a memoir on Polynesian art in 1890,
which was followed by one on American art in 1896. Dr. C. H. Read,[97]
Mr. H. Balfour (1893),[98] and others, worked on similar lines, and much
valuable research in this direction has also been accomplished by
American and German ethnologists.
Footnote 96:
_Trans. Lanc. and Cheshire Ant. Soc._, 1889.
Footnote 97:
_Journ. Anth. Inst._, xxi., 1891, p. 139.
Footnote 98:
_Evolution of Dec. Art._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X.
SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGION
THOSE branches of cultural anthropology which deal with comparative
sociology and magico-religious data are sometimes designated as
“ethnology.” It frequently happens that students who have written upon
these and closely allied subjects have in the same book treated the
archæological, technical, and linguistic aspects of cultural
anthropology or ethnology in the larger sense. It is therefore
impossible to keep to a precise classification of the subject when
dealing with it historically.
[Sidenote: =Comparative Ethnology.=]
The main stumbling-block in the way of comparative ethnology was the
difficulty of establishing the study on a firm scientific basis. “Man
cannot be secluded from disturbing influences, and watched, like the
materials of a chemical experiment in a laboratory.”[99] Ethnologists
were accused of basing their conclusions on the most fragile evidence,
collected from most untrustworthy sources:—
Footnote 99:
Lang, 1898, p. 39.
Anything you please ... you may find among your useful
savages.... You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil
in hand, and pick out what suits your case.... Your testimony is
often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the
people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by
one or other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a
science on such foundations, especially as the savage informants
wish to please or to mystify inquirers, or they answer at
random, or deliberately conceal their most sacred institutions,
or have never paid any attention to the subject? (_l.c._, p.
41).
To remove this reproach was the work of Professor Tylor.
[Sidenote: =Edward Burnett Tylor.=]
It is difficult to express in adequate terms what Professor E. B. Tylor
has done for ethnology. He is the founder of the science of comparative
ethnology; and his two great works, _Early History of Mankind_ (1865)
and _Primitive Culture_ (1871), while replete with vast erudition, are
so suggestive and graced by such a charming literary style and quiet
humour that they have become “classics,” and have profoundly influenced
modern thought. From their first appearance it was recognised that a
master-mind was guiding the destinies of the nascent science. Some idea
of the magnitude and diversity of his work may be gathered from the
bibliography of 262 items, published between 1861 and 1907, collected by
Miss Freire-Marreco, _Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett
Tylor in Honour of his Seventy-first Birthday, Oct. 2, 1907_. An
appreciation of the labours of Professor Tylor is given by Andrew Lang
in this volume. The true significance of the aims of “Mr. Tylor’s
Science,” as Max Müller called it, may be best gathered from Professor
Tylor’s own words:—
For years past it has become evident that the great need of
anthropology is that its methods should be strengthened and
systematised. The world has not been unjust to the growing
science, far from it. Wherever anthropologists have been able to
show definite evidence and inference, for instance, in the
development series of arts in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford,
not only specialists, but the educated world generally, are
ready to receive the results and assimilate them into public
opinion. Strict method has, however, as yet, only been
introduced over part of the anthropological field. There has yet
to be overcome a certain not unkindly hesitancy on the part of
men engaged in the precise operations of mathematics, physics,
chemistry, biology, to admit that the problems of anthropology
are amenable to scientific treatment. It is my aim to show that
the development of institutions may be investigated on a basis
of tabulation and classification.
This is the opening of a masterly paper “On a Method of Investigating
the Development of Institutions; applied to Laws of Marriage and
Descent.”[100]
Footnote 100:
_J. A. I._, xviii., 245, 1889.
The tabular method is not applicable to much of the vast mass of
material with which Tylor dealt; but the accuracy and systematising of
method are found throughout, and were of invaluable service to a science
peculiarly attractive to the vague speculator and enthusiastic
_dilettante_.
Tylor (1871) insisted on the necessity of sifting and testing all the
evidence, relying to a great extent on “the test of recurrence,” or of
undesigned coincidence in testimony; he says: “the more odd the
statement, the less likely that several people in several places should
have made it wrongly. This being so, it seems reasonable to judge that
the statements are in the main truly given, and that their close and
regular coincidence is due to the cropping-up of similar facts in
various districts of culture. Now the most important facts of
ethnography are vouched for in this way” (2nd ed., 1873, p. 10).
[Sidenote: =Avebury.=]
A further stimulus to the study of comparative ethnology in this country
was given by the publication of Sir John Lubbock’s (Lord Avebury’s)
_Origin of Civilisation_ (1870), and opened the eyes of a large public
to the interest of ethnology and its value in throwing light upon the
earlier stages of culture of civilised peoples.
[Sidenote: =Sociology.=]
The question as to the influence of environment on the development of
social organisation is as old as the world’s oldest thinkers, and finds
expression in Aristotle and in Plato, though Sociology, as a science, is
a product of the last century. The word “Sociology” was first used by
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who showed its aim to be to discover the
nature, the natural causes, and the natural laws of society. With the
development of natural science came the insistence on a naturalistic
interpretation of social differences, demonstrated by Guyot (1807-1884)
and Draper (1811-1882), and over-emphasised by Buckle (1821-1862).
[Sidenote: =Comte Buckle.=]
Comte’s method was that of deductive construction and prescription.
Buckle’s plan was to evolve a social science inductively through a study
of history, with the help of economics and statistics. His _History of
Civilisation_ answers the great question which he sets himself: “Are the
actions of men, and therefore of societies, governed by fixed laws, or
are they the result either of chance or of supernatural interference?”
He attempted to show how “Climate, Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of
Nature” were the dominant influences in early societies, determining the
food supply, the degree of population, and the economic condition.
Unfortunately, in pursuit of this idea Buckle was apt to overlook the
influences of culture-contact, and of economic factors; thus deserving,
to some extent, the censure of Jevons: “Buckle referred the character of
a nation to the climate and the soil of its abode.”[101] At the same
time Buckle must be regarded as the first historical sociologist of the
modern scientific movement.
Footnote 101:
_Letters and Journal of Stanley Jevons_, 1866, p. 454.
[Sidenote: =Herbert Spencer.=]
The evolutionist explanation of the natural world as applied to
sociology found its fullest exponent in Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who
studied the anatomy of the social frame. He derived the principles of
sociology from the principles of psychology and of biology, and regarded
social development as a super-organic evolution.
But all these earlier attempts to discover a social science were
speculative rather than practical. The solid foundations of inductive
sociology were laid by Bachofen, Morgan, J. F. McLennan, and others.
[Sidenote: =Bachofen, Morgan, McLennan, and others.=]
Bachofen (1861) was the first to study the system of filiation through
the mother, or mother-right, which was widely distributed among ancient
peoples, and still occurs in many regions in a more or less developed
condition. McLennan frankly states that “the honour of that discovery,
the importance of which, as affording a new starting-point for all
history, cannot be over-estimated, must, without stint or qualification,
be assigned to him” (1876, p. 421). Independently, however, J. F.
McLennan (1827-1881), in his _Primitive Marriage_ (1865), arrived at the
conclusion “that the most ancient system in which the idea of
blood-relationship was embodied was a system of kinship through females
only.”[102] He points out more than once that “Mr. Maine seems not to
have been able to conceive of any social order more primitive than the
patriarchal.”[103] This book was reprinted with additions in 1876, and
his two other books were published posthumously (1885, 1896). In these
and more fugitive writings McLennan was a keen controversialist, and
with unnecessary vigour and animus attacked Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, and
Dr. Howitt. McLennan’s attitude may be partly explained by the fact that
he was a lawyer and a theorist, but he possessed great enthusiasm, with
which he infused those who came into contact with him, and his labours
served to advance the study of sociology.
Footnote 102:
P. 124 of 1876 ed.
Footnote 103:
P. 181, _ibid._
“From the time of Plato downwards, theories of human society have been
current in which the family living under the headship of a father is
accepted as the ultimate social unit. These theories have taken various
shapes ... with Sir Henry Maine (_Ancient Law_, 1861) the theory becomes
a theory of the origin of society, or at least of the earliest stage of
society in which Comparative Jurisprudence is called upon to take
interest.”[104]
Footnote 104:
D. McLennan, _The Patriarchal Theory_, 1885, p. x.
Morgan was undoubtedly the greatest sociologist of the past century, and
in his monumental work (1871) laid a solid foundation for the study of
the family and kinship systems; he formulated a scheme of the evolution
of the family based on a study of the classificatory system of
relationships,[105] of which he was the discoverer. According to this
scheme, human society has advanced, through gradual evolution, from a
state of complete promiscuity to one characterised by monogamy. Dr.
Rivers[106] points out that “In recent years the scheme has encountered
much opposition.... The opponents of Morgan have made no attempt to
distinguish between different parts of his scheme, but, having shown
that certain of its features are unsatisfactory, they have condemned the
whole.” The greater part of Morgan’s work is, however, of lasting value.
Morgan based his conclusions on an enormous number of kinship terms
collected by himself and others from every available source. Dr. Rivers
has introduced[107] a new method of collecting similar data by means of
recording exhaustive genealogies from a limited area. In this way not
only can kinship terms be collected with accuracy, but a large number of
other sociological data are obtained with a readiness and precision not
hitherto possible. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that this method
is producing a revolution in the method of sociological field work.
Footnote 105:
W. H. R. Rivers, “On the Origin of the Classificatory System of
Relationships,” Anthropological Essays (Tylor Volume), 1907.
Footnote 106:
_Jour. Anth. Inst._, xxx., 1900, p. 74; _Sociological Rev._, 1910.
Footnote 107:
In the classificatory system most of the kin in the same generation
are grouped under one general term; _e.g._, all the males of the
grandfather’s generation are called by one term—another term includes
father, father’s brothers, father’s male cousins, mother’s sisters’
husbands, mother’s female cousins’ husbands, and so on.
In a later book (1878) Morgan summarised his earlier conclusions and
proposed a classification of culture consisting of a lower, middle, and
an upper Status of Savagery, a lower, middle, and an upper Status of
Barbarism, and the Status of Civilisation based upon certain inventions
and industries.
About this time various students wrote on marriage and the family, of
whom the foremost were Giraud Teulon (1867, 1874, 1884), H. Post (1875),
Letourneau (1888), Von Hellwald (1889), and others, the conclusions of
the earlier writers being summed up by Professor E. Westermarck in his
masterly _History of Human Marriage_ (1891); but much has been written
since that date on this subject of perennial interest.
Professor F. H. Giddings, in his _Principles of Sociology_, sums up in
the following words the trend of modern writers on ethnological
sociology:—
Professor Ludwig Gumplowicz [1883] has tried to demonstrate that
the true elementary social phenomena are the conflicts,
amalgamations, and assimilations of heterogeneous ethnical
groups. M. Novicow [1893], generalising further, argues that
social evolution is essentially a progressive modification of
conflict by alliance, in the course of which conflict itself is
transformed from a physical into an intellectual struggle.
Professor De Greef [1886], looking at the question in a very
different way, finds the distinctive social fact in contract,
and measures social progress according to the displacement of
coercive authority by conscious argument. Mr. Gabriel Tarde
[1890], in an original and fascinating study, which has made an
enduring impress on both psychological and sociological thought,
argues that the primordial social fact is imitation, a
phenomenon antecedent to all mutual aid, division of labour, and
contract. Professor Émile Durkheim [1895], dissenting from the
conclusions of M. Tarde, undertakes to prove that the
characteristically social process, and therefore the ultimate
social phenomenon, is a coercion of every individual mind by
modes of action, thought, and feeling that are external to
itself (p. 14).
According to Giddings, the original and elementary subjective fact in
society is “the consciousness of kind.”
Social psychology offers a vast and fertile field which has been but
little worked, and there was needed an introduction to the subject which
should afford that general point of view which is the starting-point of
further studies. This Dr. W. McDougall has attempted in a recently
published little book.[108] His general conclusion is that the life of
societies is not merely the sum of the activities of individuals moved
by enlightened self-interest, or by intelligent desire for pleasure and
aversion from pain; but that the springs of all the complex activities
that make up the life of societies must be sought in the instincts and
in the other primary tendencies that are common to all men and are
deeply rooted in the remote ancestry of the race. Professor E. A. Ross,
of Wisconsin, simultaneously attacked the same subject, on the problems
of which he had previously written.[109]
[Sidenote: =Magic and Religion.=]
Magic and religion are very generally held to be not only distinct from
one another, but antithetical. There is, however, a tendency among
certain living students to regard them as analogous phenomena, both
being expressions of a belief in a power or energy which may be
designated by the Melanesian term “mana,” or the American “orenda.” It
has more than once been pointed out that it is in some cases very
hard—perhaps impossible—to determine whether certain actions can be
classed as either magical or religious, as they appear to belong to both
categories. As in the case of religion from the ethnological standpoint,
magic has been investigated in the field, and immediate references to it
are to be found in ethnological literature—the comparative study of
magic has to some extent been undertaken by Frazer, Jevons, and others;
but one of the most important contributions to the subject is by Hubert
and Mauss,[110] who treat it from a sociological aspect.
Footnote 108:
_An Introduction to Social Psychology_, 1908.
Footnote 109:
_Congress of Arts and Sci., St. Louis_, 1904, v. (1906), p. 869.
Footnote 110:
H. Hubert et M. Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,”
_L’Année sociologique_, vii., 1904. M. Mauss, “L’Origine des pouvoirs
magiques dans les sociétés Australiennes,” _École pratique des Haute
Études_ (Sec. Relig.), 1904.
[Sidenote: =Anthropology and Religion.=]
Parson Thwackum in _Tom Jones_ says: “When I mention religion I mean the
Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the
Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the
Church of England.” Anthropology, by a reverse process, passes “in
larger sympathy from specific creeds to partake of the universal spirit
which every creed tries to embody.”[111] The interest of Anthropology in
religion was defined by Huxley.[112] “Anthropology has nothing to do
with the truth or falsehood of religion—it holds itself absolutely and
entirely aloof from such questions—but the natural history of religion,
and the origin and growth of the religions entertained by the different
tribes of the human race, are within its proper and legitimate
province.”
Footnote 111:
Clodd, _Animism_, 1905, p. 11.
Footnote 112:
Address to Dept. of Anthrop., Brit. Ass. Dublin, 1878.
This is not the place to attempt a definition of religion—a task which
has led to so many failures. We must be content with the statement that
it most frequently presents itself under the aspects of ritual, myth,
and belief. Anthropology has hitherto practically confined its attention
to ritual and myth, and but too frequently exclusively to the last.
As Andrew Lang (1887)[113] points out, in the sixth century B.C.
Xenophanes complained that the gods were credited with the worst crimes,
and other classical writers were shocked at the contradictions between
the conception and ritual worship of the same god. In ancient Egypt the
priests strove to shift the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their
own deities. It taxed the ingenuity of pious Brahmans to explain the
myths which made Indra the slayer of a Brahman. Euhemerus (316 B.C.), in
his philosophical romance, _Sacra Historica_, in rationalising the
fables about the gods was regarded as an atheist. Certain writers like
Plutarch (60 A.D.) and Porphyry (270 A.D.) made the ancient deities
types of their own favourite doctrines, whatever these might happen to
be. The early Christians had a good case against the heathen. Eusebius,
in the _Præparatio Evangelica_, anticipating Andrew Lang himself,
“ridiculed, with a good deal of humour, the old theories which resolved
so many mythical heroes into the sun” (p. 20). “The physical
interpreters,” said Eusebius, “do not even agree in their physical
interpretations.” The light of the anthropological method had dawned on
Eusebius. Many centuries later Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge (1630-93), had no other scheme in his mind in his
erudite work on Hebrew ritual,[114] which he considered was but an
expurgated adaptation of heathen customs. Fontenelle[115] explained the
irrational element in myth as inherited from savagery.
Footnote 113:
1899 ed., pp. 6, 7.
Footnote 114:
_De Legibus Hebræorum Ritualibus_, 1732.
Footnote 115:
_De l’Origine des Fables: Œuvres_, Vol. III., 1758.
The revival of learning made scholars acquainted with the religions not
only of Greece and Rome, but of the nations with whom the Greeks and
Romans had come in contact—Egyptians, Semites, Persians, and Indians.
Travellers gave accounts of the religions they found in remote parts of
the world, and missionaries reported on beliefs and customs of many
nations. These were the sources from which were compiled the
comprehensive works on religion, from Alexander Ross, _View of All the
Religions in the World_, etc., 1652, to Dupuis, _Origine de tous les
cultes ou Religion Universelle_, 1794. All heathen religions were
believed to be based on sun and star worship.
New vistas were opened up by the writings of De Brosses (1760), who
investigated the beliefs of savage races and based all religion on
“Fetishism.”
To quote once more from Lang: “In the beginning of the [nineteenth]
century Germany turned her attention to mythology. In a pious kind of
spirit, Friedrich Creuzer [1771-1858] sought to find symbols of some
pure, early, and Oriental theosophy in the myths and mysteries of
Greece. The great Lobeck, in his _Aglaophamus_ (1829), brought back
common-sense, and made it the guide of his vast, his unequalled
learning. In a gentler and more genial spirit, C. Ottfried Müller
[1797-1840] laid the foundation of a truly scientific and historical
mythology. Neither of these writers had, like Alfred Maury [1857], much
knowledge of the myths and faiths of the lower races, but they often
seem on the point of anticipating the ethnological method.” (_L.c._, p.
23.)
[Sidenote: =Folklore.=]
The mythological aspect of the subject was illuminated by the researches
of the brothers Grimm (J. L. K., 1785-1863; W. K., 1786-1859), whose
collections of Märchen (1812-5) were found to contain Teutonic myths,
and by their resemblance to Norse, Greek, and Vedic mythology suggested
that in German folklore were remains of a common Indo-Germanic
tradition. This was the beginning of the intelligent study of Folklore.
Mannhardt (1865) and others investigated popular, and especially
peasant, customs and beliefs connected with agriculture and vegetation;
and showed that here, in what Christianity had reduced to superstition,
were to be found survivals of the religions that Christianity had
supplanted. Thenceforward the study of Folklore, and of the “lower
mythology” of beliefs, customs, and superstitions, gradually developed
into a science, which is now recognised as the valuable ally of
Anthropology. Meanwhile the anthropological signification of religion
was emerging from the mass of materials collected from all over the
globe. Anthropology established its universality, and made many attempts
to find a common factor, first in astral worship, then in Euhemerism
(Banier, 1738), Fetishism (De Brosses, 1709-1777), Nature-worship (Max
Müller, etc.), Ancestor-worship (Herbert Spencer, Lippert [1866], etc.),
and later in Totemism. These hypotheses were based on the erroneous
assumption that savage religion represented the primitive mode of
thought, out of which civilised religions had evolved. Later it was
realised that “The Australian black or the Andaman Islander is separated
by as many generations from the beginning of religion as his most
advanced contemporaries; and in these tens or hundreds of thousands of
years there has been constant change, growth, and decay—and decay is not
a simple return to the primal state. We can learn a great deal from the
lowest existing religions, but they cannot tell us what the beginning of
religion was, any more than the history of language can tell us what was
the first human speech.”[116]
Footnote 116:
G. F. Moore, “The Hist. of Religions in the Nineteenth Cent.,”
_Congress Arts and Sci., St. Louis_, 1904, p. 440.
[Sidenote: =Comparative Religion.=]
The study of comparative religion, though not originated by Max Müller
(1823-1900), owed much to his energy. His lectures on Comparative
Mythology (1856) were followed by lectures on the Science of Religion
(1870), and on the religions of the world (1873). He inaugurated the
annual series of the Hibbert Lectures with a study of the origin and
growth of Religion, as illustrated by the religions of India; and as
Gifford lecturer at Glasgow (1888-1892), discussed Natural Religion,
Physical Religion, Anthropological Religion, and Theosophy or
Psychological Religion. His _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_
appeared in 1897. His method of investigation was almost entirely
linguistic, based on phonetic laws which later research has discredited;
and his theory of “mythology as the disease of language” is no longer
tenable.
The charm of the writings of Max Müller, and the interest which they
awakened in Vedic studies, gave a new impulse to the study of the
history of religions. The hymns of the Rig-Veda are by no means the
product of a simple society, as he supposed; in his view hymns and myths
were dissociated from ritual religion, and gods were identified with
natural objects. The death-blow to this method of studying religion in
our country was given by the keen criticism of Andrew Lang (1884, 1887).
The too-narrow basis of Max Müller’s theories was overthrown by
arguments derived from comparative ethnology; “the silly, senseless, and
savage element” (as he termed it) in classical mythology proved to be
the stumbling-block over which he fell.
A firmer foundation for the study was laid by Tylor and Lubbock. Though
Max Müller originated the name Science of Religion, it was Tylor who
first introduced into it a scientific method, and so laid the
foundations for future investigation.
Later workers in the field fall naturally into two groups. Some make
intensive studies of particular forms of religion, either historical,
such as Robertson Smith (1846-1894), or living, such as Codrington in
Melanesia, J. O. Dorsey[117] in America, Spencer and Gillen in
Australia, and many others.
Footnote 117:
“Omaha Sociology,” _Ann. Rep. Bur. Am. Ethn. Rep._ iii., 1884; “Siouan
Sociology,” xv., 1897.
Other workers attempt, by correlating the mass of material, to discover
the fundamental religious conceptions of man, and to trace their
subsequent development. Among these may be noted Grant Allen, Crawley,
Frazer, Hartland, Jevons, Andrew Lang, Marett, and many others.
To those who are acquainted with the modern study of comparative
religion in this country it is unnecessary to point out the influence of
such workers as Mannhardt, Tylor, and Robertson Smith on subsequent
writers; nor is it needful to draw attention to the vast erudition and
eloquent writing of Professor J. G. Frazer, whose monumental work on
_The Golden Bough_ has become a classic, or to the memorable _Legend of
Perseus_ by E. S. Hartland.
The study of the myths of various peoples is receiving the attention of
numerous students, and in Germany certain ethnologists, such as
Ehrenreich, Foy,[118] and Frobenius,[119] find sun and moon gods in the
most unlikely places. There is, however, considerable danger that this
nature-mythology is being carried too far.
Footnote 118:
_Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, x., 1907, etc.
Footnote 119:
“Die Weltanschauung der Naturvölker,” _Beitr. z. Volks-und
Völkerkunde_, vi., 1898; _Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes_, i., 1904;
_The Childhood of Man_, 1909.
The origin of the moral idea has also been discussed from the
ethnological point of view, as Hobhouse (1906) and Westermarck (1906)
have exemplified in their great books.
Magic, religion, and morality have, as we have seen, especially of late
years, been regarded almost entirely from the anthropological
standpoint. But a new school of French students has arisen who maintain
that these are essentially social phenomena. The writings of Durkheim,
Hubert and Mauss[120] have initiated a new method of study which
promises to have far-reaching results.
Footnote 120:
The work of this school is mainly to be found in _L’Année
sociologique_ (1898).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI.
LINGUISTICS
LINGUISTICS as a department of Anthropology may be regarded from many
points of view. To the evolutionist language forms one of the tests
dividing the Hominidæ from the other anthropoids; the somatologist is
interested in correlating the phonetic system with the structure of the
organs connected with the mechanism of speech; and the ethnologist
studies language for the evidence it affords of ethnic affinity or
social contact, or as a means of determining the grade of culture to
which a particular people has attained, or, again, as a reflection of
their character or psychology. The linguistic classifications of
Gallatin, Humboldt, and Müller are referred to later.
[Sidenote: =The Aryan Controversy.=]
The connection between linguistics and anthropology assumed its greatest
importance in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the discoveries
and theories of philologists were adopted wholesale to explain the
problems of European ethnology, and the Aryan controversy became the
_locus_ of disturbance throughout the Continent. “No other scientific
question, with the exception, perhaps, of the doctrine of evolution, was
ever so bitterly discussed or so infernally confounded at the hands of
Chauvinistic or otherwise biassed writers.”[121]
Footnote 121:
Ripley, 1899, p. 453.
In 1786 Sir William Jones had pointed out the relationship between
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and Celtic, and suggested a common
parentage, which was confirmed by Bopp in 1835. Unfortunately, a
primitive unity of speech was held to imply a primitive unity of race.
Among the ethnological papers read at the meeting of the British
Association in 1847 was one “On the Results of the recent Egyptian
Researches in reference to Asiatic and African Ethnology, and the
Classification of Languages,” in which Baron Bunsen sought to show that
the whole of mankind could be classified according to language. In fact,
it was taken for granted in 1847 that the study of comparative philology
would be in future the only safe foundation for the study of
anthropology.[122] The spread of this fallacy is usually attributed to
Max Müller, whose charm of style and high reputation as a Sanskrit
scholar did much to popularise the new science of philology. He invented
the term “Aryan,” which in itself contains two erroneous assumptions—one
linguistic, that the Indo-Iranian group of languages is older than its
relatives; and the other geographical, that its “cradle” was in ancient
Ariana, in Central Asia. Moreover, in his lectures he not only spoke of
an Aryan language, but of an “Aryan race.” He is credited with having
made “heroic reparation” for these errors when he wrote later: “To me an
ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and
hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic
dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar. It is worse than a Babylonian
confusion of tongues—it is downright theft.” But, as he pointed
out,[123] he himself never shared the misconception that he was accused
of launching on the world. He admits that he was not entirely without
blame, as he allowed himself occasionally the freedom to speak of the
Aryan or the Semitic race, meaning the people who spoke Aryan or Semitic
languages; but as early as 1853 he had protested against the intrusion
of linguistics into ethnology, and
called, if not for a complete divorce, at least for a judicial
separation between the study of Philology and the study of
Ethnology.... The phonologist should collect his evidence,
arrange his classes, divide and combine as if no Blumenbach had
ever looked at skulls, as if no Camper had ever measured facial
angles, as if no Owen had ever examined the base of a cranium.
His evidence is the evidence of language, and nothing else; this
he must follow, even though in the teeth of history, physical or
political.... There ought to be no compromise between
ethnological and phonological science. It is only by stating the
glaring contradictions between the two that truth can be
elicited.[124]
Footnote 122:
_Rep. Brit. Assoc._ (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.
Footnote 123:
_Rep. Brit. Assoc._ (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.
Footnote 124:
_Rep. Brit. Assoc._ (Cardiff), 1891, p. 787.
The protest was in vain. The belief in an “Aryan race” became an
accepted fact both in linguistics and in ethnology, and its influence
vitiates the work of many anthropologists even at the present day.
Naturally the question of the identity of the Aryan race was soon a
subject of keen debate. The French and German schools at once assumed
opposite sides, the Germans claiming that the Aryans were tall, fair,
and long-headed, the ancestors of the modern Teutons; and the French,
mainly on cultural evidence, claiming that the language, together with
civilisation, came into Europe with the Alpine race, which forms such a
large element in the modern French population.
There are two ways in which linguistics may be studied as an aid to
Anthropology—first, with regard to structural analysis, by which
linguistic affinities may be proved; secondly, by what has been called
“linguistic palæontology,” or the study of root words, by means of which
the original culture of a people may be ascertained. Philology pushed
both these methods too far. It claimed the right, by proof of structural
analysis, to link up the racial relationships of the European and
Asiatic peoples, and, by linguistic palæontology, to determine the
culture of the original “Aryans,” and to identify their original home.
It was over the question of the “Aryan cradle” that they were forced to
relinquish their too ambitious claims.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was generally believed
that our first ancestors were created in 4004 B.C. and spoke Hebrew, and
that the origin of the European languages dated from the migration of
Japhet from the plains of Shinar, _cir._ 2247. The Asiatic origin of
race and language was for long unchallenged. But in 1839 Omalius
d’Halloy, followed by Latham in 1851, began to cast doubts on the
Asiatic “cradle,” noting that the Asiatic languages had no real claim to
be considered older than those of Europe, and that in many ways the
Lithuanian and Armenian were the most archaic in the family. More
important still was the work of Benfey,[125] who may be regarded as the
originator of linguistic palæontology, and who used its evidence to
shift the original dispersal from Asia to Europe. Various philologists
followed, employing different methods to prove different theories; and
the Aryan cradle was located in many parts of Europe and Asia, ranging
from the Pamir plateau to the Baltic plains. Max Müller confessed in
1888 that “the evidence is so pliant that it is possible to make out a
more or less plausible case” for almost any part of the world.
Footnote 125:
T. Benfey, in preface to Fick’s _Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der
Indogermanischen Sprachen_, 1868.
[Sidenote: =Language and Race.=]
From claiming too much the swing of the pendulum brought linguistics
into disrepute with ethnologists, and for a time the evidence of
language was looked upon with suspicion. Even philologists were accused
of going too far in this direction.
Professor Sayce[126] says: “Identity or relationship of language can
prove nothing more than social contact.... Language is an aid to the
historian, not to the ethnologist.” But, as Professor Keane points out,
there are many cases in which language infallibly proves the existence
of ethnic elements which would otherwise have been unsuspected—as, for
example, in the case of the Basques of Europe. “Language used with
judgment is thus seen to be a great aid to the ethnologist in
determining racial affinities, and in solving many anthropological
difficulties” (1896, p. 205).
Although Max Müller wrote nearly twenty years ago, “I believe the time
will come when no anthropologist will venture to write on anything
concerning the inner life of man without having himself acquired a
knowledge of the language in which that inner life finds its truest
expression,” we are obliged still to echo his lament: “How few of the
books in which we trust with regard to the characteristics or
peculiarities of savage races have been written by men ... who have
learnt their languages until they could speak them as well as the
natives themselves!”[127]
Footnote 126:
_Science of Language_, ii., p. 317.
Footnote 127:
_Rep. Brit. Assoc._ (Cardiff), 1891, p. 792.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII.
CULTURAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT
WE have seen that in its beginning the science of man was little more
than a branch of zoology, and that his structural characters were the
first to attract attention and to form the material of study; hence all
the earlier classifications were based on physical features. Gallatin
was one of the first to classify mankind rather by what they _do_ than
by what they _are_.
[Sidenote: =Gallatin.=]
Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) was born at Geneva, emigrated to America
before he was twenty, and rose rapidly to the position of one of the
foremost of American statesmen, becoming United States Minister to
France, and later to England. He noted the unsatisfactoriness of
groupings by colour, stature, head-form, etc., in the case of the races
of America, and made a preliminary classification of the native tribes
on the basis of language. Major J. W. Powell (1834-1902) and Dr. Brinton
(1837-1899) elaborated the linguistic classification of the American
Indians.
[Sidenote: =Wilhelm von Humboldt.=]
Classification by language had already been utilised by Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767-1835) in the introduction to his great work on the Kawi
language of Java, entitled _Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des
Menschengeschlechts_, which was published posthumously, 1836-40. The
rise of the new science of philology gave a fresh impetus to this method
of classification, which was adopted by F. Müller (1834-1898), and
utilised recently by Deniker and various other writers.
Other classifications, by means of cultural distinctions, have been
attempted. Among these may be noted that based on mythology and religion
of Max Müller, on institutions and social organisation of Morgan and
Ratzel, or on musical systems of Fétis.
[Sidenote: =Hippocrates.=]
Hippocrates (_c._ 460-377), in his work, _About Air, Water, and Places_,
first discusses the influence of environment on man, physical, moral,
and pathological. He divided mankind into groups, impressed with
homogeneous characters by homogeneous surroundings, demonstrating that
mountains, plains, damp, aridity, and so on, produced definite and
varying types.
[Sidenote: =Bodin.=]
Bodin, writing in 1577 _Of the Lawes and Customes of a Common Wealth_
(English edition, 1605), contains, as Professor J. L. Myres has pointed
out,[128] “the whole pith and kernel of modern anthropo-geography....
His climatic contrasts are based on the Ptolemaic geography ... and he
argues as if the world broke off short at Sahara.... On his
classification of environments from arctic North to tropic South” he
superposes “a cross-division by grades of culture from civil East to
barbaric West.”
Footnote 128:
_Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1909 (1910), p. 593.
[Sidenote: =Buffon.=]
Buffon followed Hippocrates. Man, said Buffon, consists of a single
species. Individual variations are due to three causes—climate, food,
and habits. These influences, acting over large areas on large groups of
people, produce general and constant varieties. To these varieties he
gave the name of _race_. This doctrine was the main support of the
monogenists.
[Sidenote: =Alexander von Humboldt, Ritter, and Waitz.=]
The year 1859 marks a crisis in this field of research, as in so many
others. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the Prussian naturalist and
traveller, spent the later part of his life in writing his classic
_Kosmos_, a summary and exposition of the laws and conditions of the
physical universe. Karl Ritter (1779-1859), Professor of Geography at
the University of Berlin, published, between 1822 and his death, the ten
volumes of _Die Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des
Menschen_. These works formed the basis from which was developed the
German view of geography as a science of the co-relation of
distribution. In 1859 Waitz, in his _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_,
insisted on the inter-relation between the physical organisation and the
psychic life of mankind.
[Sidenote: =Buckle.=]
Between 1857 and 1861 appeared Buckle’s _History of Civilisation_, in
which the influence of environment on mankind is strongly emphasised.
“To one of these four classes (Climate, Food, Soil, and the General
Aspect of Nature) may be referred all the external phenomena by which
Man has been permanently affected.”[129] The recognition of the
environmental influence has long been a characteristic of the French
school. Ripley (1900, p. 4) points out that, wherever the choice lies
between heredity and environment, the French almost always prefer the
latter as the explanation of the phenomenon. This is seen from the time
of Bodin (1530-1596) and Montesquieu (1689-1755), with their objective
explanations of philosophy, and Cuvier, who traced the close
relationship between philosophy and geological formation, to Turquan
(1896), who mapped out the awards made by the Paris Salon, showing the
coincidence of the birth-place of the artists with the fertile river
basins.
Footnote 129:
_L.c._, chap. ii.
[Sidenote: =Ratzel. Reclus.=]
In Germany the exponents of these theories were Cotta and Kohl, and
later Peschel, Kirchhoff, Bastian, and Gerland; but the greatest name of
all is that of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), who has written the
standard work on _Anthropo-Geographie_ (1882-91). Another monumental
work is that by Élisée Reclus (1820-1905), _Nouvelle Géographie
Universelle_ (1879-1894).
[Sidenote: =Le Play.=]
A great stimulus to the development of ethnological sociology was given
by the school of Le Play in France, the concrete application of whose
theories was worked out by Demolins and others, and published in _La
Science Sociale_ and separate works. It is the essential procedure of
the followers of this school, in their studies in descriptive sociology,
to begin with the environment, and to trace its effects upon the
occupation of the people, their sociology, and so forth. The method is
an extremely suggestive one, and has led to many brilliant
generalisations. The danger consists in theorising from imperfect data,
and there is a tendency to attribute certain social conditions directly
to the influences of environment and occupation, where a wider knowledge
of ethnology would show that these or analogous social conditions
obtained in other places where they were not produced by the causes
suggested.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_RETROSPECT_
ON taking a brief final survey of the history of anthropology, one is
struck by the fact that, owing to the tendency of students to limit
their attention to one of the varied subjects which are grouped under
the term Anthropology, the progress of the science has been very
irregular.
Physical anthropology has had very numerous devotees, who have
approached the subject mainly from the point of view of small anatomical
variations; but even at the present day the significance of many of the
details is not understood, and very little advance has been made
concerning the criteria of racial anatomy. We have yet to discover how
adequately to describe or gauge the essential anatomical distinctions
between races and peoples. This problem is complicated by our ignorance
of the stability of physical characters, and of how far or how speedily
they are affected by change of environment. At the present time the
effects of miscegenation and of environment afford fruitful fields for
research. The imperfection of the geological record is answerable for
the relatively slow progress that has been made in tracing the evolution
of man as an animal.
Whereas the structural characters of man have been studied by trained
scientific men, the history of man from a cultural point of view has
mainly been investigated by literary men, who have approached the
subject from various sides, and, from lack of experience in the field or
by virtue of their natural reliance upon documentary evidence, have
often not been sufficiently critical regarding their authorities. The
comparative method has yielded most valuable results, but it is liable
to lead the unwary into mistakes. To employ biological terms, analogy is
apt to be mistaken for homology, since customs or beliefs (which, it
must be remembered, are in the vast majority of cases extremely
imperfectly recorded) may have a superficial resemblance. If all the
facts were known, they might be found to have had a very different
origin or significance. Comparisons made within a given area or among
cognate peoples have a greater value than those drawn from various parts
of the world. What is most needed at the present day is intensive study
of limited areas; the studies already so made have proved most fruitful.
Although we know a good deal about many forms of social organisation, we
find that in very few cases is the knowledge sufficiently precise to
explain them, owing to the fact that the data were not collected by
adequately trained observers. In other words, cultural anthropology has
been too much at the mercy of students who have not received a
sufficiently rigorous training.
The objects made by man have only recently been subjected to critical
study. In this the archæologists have been in advance of the
ethnologists. The distribution of objects and its significance have been
studied more in Germany than elsewhere, and already afford promising
results.
Anthropology is slowly becoming a coherent and organised science. The
chief danger to which it is liable is that its fascination and
popularity, touching as it does every department of human thought and
activity, tend to premature generalisations.
The history of Anthropology, like that of most other sciences, is full
of examples of opposition from the prejudice and bigotry of those who
place more reliance on tradition than on the results of investigations
and the logical deductions therefrom; but the reactionaries have always
had to give way in the end.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Agassiz, L., 91
Allen, Grant, 142
Aristotle, 6, 14, 51
Avebury, Lord, 131, 141
Bachofen, J. J., 132
Balfour, H., 127
Barclay, 32
Bastian, A., 80, 82, 152
Beard, 120
Beddoe, J., 44
Bernier, F., 88 _sq._
Bertillon, A., 49
Bertrand, A. J. L., 122
Blower, 92
Blumenbach, J. F., 25, 27 _sqq._, 99, 107
Boas, F., 69
Bodin, J., 110, 150 _sq._
Bonstetten, G., 122
Bory de Saint-Vincent, 53, 91 _sq._
Boucher de Perthes, J., 121 _sqq._
Bourgeois, Abbé, 123 _sq._
Boyd Dawkins, W., 115, 123
Breuil, H., 123
Brinton, D. G., 149
Broca, P. P., 35 _sqq._, 53, 71, 93
Brosses, C. de, 139 _sq._
Buckland, W., 116 _sq._
Buckle, H. T., 131 _sq._, 151
Buffon, G. L. L. Comte de, 18, 20 _sqq._, 55, 113, 150
Camper, P., 30 _sqq._
Capellini, 124
Capitan, Dr., 123
Cartailhac, E., 123
Chambers, R., 59 _sqq._
Chantre, E., 122
Christol, Tournal de, 117
Christy, H., 122
Comte, A., 131
Crawley, E., 142
Cunningham, D. J., 64
Cuvier, Baron G. L. C. F., 53, 57 _sqq._, 70, 91, 95, 152
Darwin, C., 62 _sqq._, 96
Daubenton, 32
Davis, J. Barnard, 123
Demolins, E., 152
Deniker, J., 93 _sq._, 108, 150
Dennett, R. E., 82 _sqq._
Desmoulins, A., 91 _sq._, 107
Doornik, J. E., 33
Dorsey, J. O., 142
Draper, J. W., 131
Dubois, E., 76 _sq._
Duckworth, W. H. L., 77, 97
Dupont, E., 117
Dupuis, C. F., 139
Durkheim, É., 135, 143
Ecker, J. A., 123
Edwards, W. F., 99
Ehrenreich, P., 142
Evans, J., 114, 122 _sqq._
Fechner, G. T., 85
Flower, W., 93 _sq._
Fontenelle, B. le B. de, 138
Fouillée, A., 85
Foy, W., 142
Frazer, J. G., 136, 142
Frere, J., 113
Frobenius, L., 142
Fuhlrott, C., 71, 123
Gallatin, A., 149
Galton, F., 47 _sqq._, 85, 87
Gerland, G., 98, 152
Giddings, F. H., 7, 135
Gillen, F. J., 142
Giraud-Teulon, A., 134
Gliddon, G. R., 53, 91, 107
Grattan, J., 33 _sq._
Greef, G. de, 135
Greenwell, Canon, 123
Grimm, J. L. K., 139
Grimm, W. K., 139
Guyot, A. H., 131
Gumplowicz, L., 135
Haeckel, E., 91, 93, 96
Hamy, E. T., 38
Harrison, B., 125
Hartland, E. S., 142
Hauser, O., 73
Haworth, S., 17
Hellwald, F. A. H. von, 135
Herder, J. G. von, 110
Herodotus, 101, 108
Herschel, W., 49
Heusinger, 92
Hippocrates, 13, 150
Hobbes, T., 110
Hobhouse, L. T., 143
Hovelacque, A. A., 53
Howitt, A. W., 133
Hubert, H., 137, 143
Humboldt, A. von, 102, 151
Humboldt, W. von, 144, 149
Hundt, Magnus, 6
Hunt, J., 53, 64 _sq._, 67 _sq._, 79
Huxley, T. H., 60 _sqq._, 71, 92, 96
Jevons, F. B., 132, 136, 142
Kames, Lord, 53
Keane, A. H., 91, 95, 108
Keller, F., 119 _sq._
Kölliker, 92
Kollmann, J., 19
Knox, R., 53, 107
Lamarck, J. B. A., 57
Lang, A., 137, 139, 141 _sq._
Lartet, E., 122
Latham, R. G., 107, 147
Lawrence, Sir W., 16, 55 _sq._
Le Play, 152
Letourneau, C., 134
Lindenschmidt, L., 123
Linnæus, K., 20 _sqq._, 54, 89 _sq._, 95
Lissauer, A., 123
Locke, J., 110
Lubbock, J. _See_ Avebury
Lucretius, 101 _sq._
Lyell, C., 117, 121 _sqq._
McDougall, W., 7, 86, 136
MacEnery, J., 117 _sq._
McLennan, J. F., 132 _sq._
MacRitchie, D., 19
Maine, H., 133
Mannhardt, W., 140, 142
March, H. Colley, 127
Marett, R. R., 142
Mason, Otis T., 127
Mauss, M., 137, 143
Meigs, J. A., 32, 35
Mercati, 113
Monboddo, J. B., 56
Montelius, O., 123
Montesquieu, C. de S., Baron de, 110, 152
Morgan, L. H., 132 _sqq._, 150
Mortillet G. de, 123 _sq._
Morton, S. G., 33
Müller, Friedrich, 93, 107, 150
Müller, F. Max, 140 _sq._, 145 _sqq._, 150
Myers, C. S., 46, 86
Myres, J. L., 99 _sqq._, 108, 110
Nicolucci, G., 123
Noetling, F., 124
Norris, E., 95
Nott, J. C., 53, 91, 107
Novicow, M., 135
Nyerup, R., 114
Owen, R., 64, 121
Pearson, K., 47, 87
Pengelly, W., 118, 120 _sq._
Peschel, O., 107, 152
Peyrère, de la, 52, 113
Peyrony, M., 73
Pickering, C., 107
Piette, E., 123
Pitt-Rivers, A. H. Lane-Fox, 126 _sq._
Post, H., 134
Powell, J. W., 149
Prichard, J. C., 53, 55, 95, 104 _sqq._
Pruner Bey, F., 92
Quatrefages, A. de, 18, 35, 38, 44, 53
Quetelet, L. A. J., 47
Ratzel, F., 104, 107, 150, 152
Read, C. H., 127
Reclus, J. Élisée, 104, 152
Retzius, Anders, 33 _sq._
Ribeiro, C., 124
Ridgeway, W., 109
Ripley, W. Z., 91
Ritter, K., 151
Rivers, W. H. R., 86, 134
Rivière, E., 122
Rolleston, G., 123
Ross, A., 139
Ross, E. A., 136
Saint-Hilaire, E. G., 59
Saint-Hilaire, I. G., 92
Schmerling, Dr., 117
Schoetensack, O., 73
Semper, G., 127
Sergi, G., 40
Serres, Marcel de, 117
Smith, W. Robertson, 142
Sollas, W. J., 75, 77, 125
Spencer, B., 142
Spencer, H., 62, 85, 132
Sperling, J., 17
Stolpe, H., 127
Strabo, 102
Tarde, G., 135
Thurnam, J., 123
Topinard, P., 35, 37, 93, 108
Tylor, E. B., 99, 104, 129 _sq._, 141 _sq._
Tyson, E., 17 _sqq._
Vesalius, 15
Virchow, R. L. K., 39, 44, 71, 123
Virey, J. J., 53, 91
Vogt, C., 65, 96
Waitz, F. T., 92, 95, 107, 151
Westermarck, E., 135, 143
White, C., 43
Windle, B. C. A., 19
Worsaae, J. J. A., 115
Wundt, W., 86
Wilde, W. R., 111, 118 _sq._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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