REPORT ON ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH OUTSIDE AMERICA. 



The object of this report is to consider which part of the world outside 

 America presents the most favorable opportunities for anthropological 

 investigation and the land of inquiry from which the most valuable results 

 may be anticipated. In considering these matters I propose to lay especial 

 stress on a feature which serves to differentiate anthropology from other 

 sciences, viz., the special urgency of its needs due to the character of its 

 material. The importance of this distinction is so great that it may be 

 dwelt upon for a moment. In the sciences dealing with inorganic matter 

 and with living creatures other than man, the phenomena which form their 

 subject-matter are stable. The decision of a chemist whether he will use 

 the present moment to attempt the synthesis of a substance is not influenced 

 by the probabiHty, much less the certainty, that in a few years the materials 

 for the synthesis will have wholly disappeared. It is only in certain depart- 

 ments of systematic biology that there is any serious loss and change of the 

 material with which science deals. With this exception the evidence now 

 present will be equally available a hundred or a thousand years hence. This 

 factor of urgency, wholly or almost without importance in other branches of 

 science, is one from which the anthropologist can never escape, and it is of 

 such vital importance that I have no hesitation in using it as my chief guide 

 in this report. 



The aim of anthropology is to teach us the history of mankind, of his 

 physical structure, mind, social organization, language, morals, religion, and 

 the useful and sesthetic arts. Taken in the widest sense, it would include 

 history in so far as it can be studied through written records; but it is 

 customary to limit the application of the term by reserving the study of 

 such records as belonging to the domain of history in the narrower sense 

 and to restrict anthropology to the study of the evidence preserved in the 

 unwritten records of the past and of the present — and the distinction of past 

 and present forms the dividing line between the two chief departments of 

 anthropology, viz., archaeology and ethnology. 



I begin by considering how these two chief departments of anthropology 

 stand with respect to their urgency. It is only very exceptionally that the 

 investigation of archajological problems can be said to be urgent. ReUcs 

 of human culture, whether they be the rude workmanship of palaeolithic 

 man or the highly elaborate work of Greek or Roman, which have lain under 

 the surface of the earth for times varying from two to twenty thousand years, 

 arc not likely to suffer any material change if they are left undisturbed for 



5 



