36o THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



It is peculiarly in " prehistoric history " that we are 

 for the time being best able to apply the scientific method. 

 That the earliest history of each individual people follows 

 general laws of human development which are capable 

 of accurate scientific statement is a view which is being 

 daily confirmed by the discoveries of comparative anthro- 

 pology, folklore, and mythology. It is true that the 

 application of these laws vari« to a certain extent with 

 the physical environment, with the climate and geographical 

 surroundings. Nevertheless, in broad outline the develop- 

 ment of man, whether in Europe, Africa, or Australasia, 

 has followed the same course. The divergencies from this 

 uniformity of development appear indeed to be less the 

 farther we penetrate into the nascent history of the human 

 race. This uniformity is to some degree of course only 

 apparent and must be attributed to the obscurity in which 

 all early history is involved. Yet it is for the greater 

 part real, and due to the fact that in the early stages of 

 civilisation the physical environment and the more animal 

 instincts of mankind are the dominating factors of evolution. 



Primitive history is not a history of individual men, 

 nor of individual nations in the modern sense ; it is a 

 description of the growth of a typical social group of 

 human beings under the influences of a definite physical 

 environment, and of characteristic physiological instincts. 

 Food, sex, geographical position, are the facts with which 



religions and of marriage. Yet this critic is so unconscious of the character 

 of his own work that he considers Dr. Westermarck confuses "history" and 

 "natural history" ! "The history of an institution," he writes, "which is 

 controlled by public opinion and regulated by law is not natural history. The 

 true history of marriage begins where the natural history of pairing ends." 

 And again : "To treat these topics [polyandry, kinship through female only, 

 infanticide, exogamy] as essentially a part of the natural history of pairing 

 involves a tacit assumption that the laws of society are at bottom mere 

 formulated instincts ; and this assumption really underlies all our author's 

 theories. His fundamental position compels him, if he will be consistent with 

 himself, to hold that every institution connected with marriage that has universal 

 validity, or forms an integral part of the main line of development, is rooted 

 in instinct, and that institutions which are not based on instinct are necessarily 

 exceptional and unimportant for scientific history." When a really scientific 

 historian can in a scientific journal reject an unscientifically executed investiga- 

 tion because it starts from an unexceptional scientific theory, we are truly in 

 topsy-turvydom. Science has yet to do a pioneer's work in the field of historical 

 method. 



