THE AIMS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 63 



This gleaning and gathering, this collecting and storing of 

 facts about man from all quarters of the world and all epochs of 

 his existence, is the first and indispensable aim of anthropologic 

 science. It is pressing and urgent beyond all other aims at this 

 period of its existence as a science, for here more than elsewhere 

 we feel the force of the Hippocratic warning that the time is 

 short and the opportunity fleeting. Every day there perish price- 

 less relics of the past, every year the languages, the habits, and 

 the modes of thought of the surviving tribes which represent the 

 earlier condition of the whole species are increasingly trans- 

 formed and lost through the extension of civilization. It devolves 

 on the scholars of this generation to be up and doing in these 

 fields of research, for those of the next will find many a chance 

 lost forever of which we can avail ourselves. 



And here let me insert a few much-needed words of counsel on 

 this portion of my theme. Why is it that even in scientific circles 

 so little attention is paid to the proper training of observers and 

 collectors in anthropology ? 



We erect stately museums, we purchase costly specimens, we 

 send out expensive expeditions ; but where are the universities, 

 the institutions of higher education, that train young men how to 

 observe, how to explore and collect in this branch ? As an emi- 

 nent ethnologist has remarked, in any other department of science 

 in that, for instance, which deals with flowers or with butterflies 

 no institution would dream of sending a collector into the field 

 who lacked all preliminary training in the line or knowledge of 

 it ; but in anthropology the opinion seems universal that such 

 preparation is quite needless. Carlyle used to say that every 

 man feels himself competent to be a gentleman farmer or a crown 

 prince ; our institutions seem to think that every man is compe- 

 tent to be an anthropologist and archeeologist ; and let a plausible 

 explorer present himself, the last question put to him will be 

 whether he has any fitness for the job. 



Hence our museums are crammed with doubtful specimens, 

 vaguely located, and our volumes of travel with incomplete or 

 wholly incorrect statements, worse than pnrely fictitious ones, 

 because we know them to be the fruit of honest intentions, and 

 therefore give them credit. 



But you will naturally ask. To what end this accumulating 

 and collecting, this filling of museums with the art products of 

 savages and the ghastly contents of charnel houses ? Why write 

 down their stupid stories and make notes of their obscene rites ? 

 When it shall be done, or as good as done, what use can be made 

 of them beyond satisfying a profitless curiosity ? 



This leads me to explain another branch of anthropology to 

 which I have not yet alluded one which introduces us to other 



