BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF EDWARD B. TYLOR. 265 



at home, as his elder brother * was an active geologist. His family 

 resided near that of the late R. Philipps, a well-knovm chemist, and 

 brother of W. Philipps, the mineralogist ; and it was mainly through 

 the influence of the Philippses that the Tyler family received its early 

 scientific bias. When residing on the Riviera, at Cannes, he made 

 the acquaintance of Lord Brougham ; Mr. Bellinder Ker, a Whig poli- 

 tician, whose father wrote a work on philology ; Mr. Hope, who left a 

 large collection of natural history objects to Oxford ; and Dr. Fal- 

 coner, the eminent paleontologist. Young Tylor traveled in Mexico 

 [ with an old and experienced collector, Mr. H. Christy, to whom every- 

 thing that was unusual (by whomsoever found) was an object to be 

 carefully preserved. As Christy had been trained by the late Dr. 

 Hodgkin, one of the founders of the Aborigines Protection Society, to 

 interest himself in everything relating to aboriginal man, so Christy 

 trained Tylor to regard nothing as trivial that had any bearing on the 

 mental states of savage men. No preparation could be more invalu- 

 able than this for the work of investigation — the collection, analysis, 

 and interpretation of facts — to which Mr. Tylor has since given his 

 undivided attention. 



The stimulus of intercourse with cultivated minds is a factor of 

 great moment in determining the career of able young men, and Mr. 

 Tylor seems to have been especially fortunate in those intimate and 

 early associations which depend upon social circumstances. Like Dr. 

 Young the physicist, and Dr. Dalton the chemist, Mr. Tylor came, as 

 we have said, of Quaker parentage ; and Sir J. Lister, his schoolfellow, 

 and also his jsredecessors, Hodgkin and Christy, were Friends, and the 

 Philippses were also born members of the society. Under such favor- 

 able associations Mr. Tylor pursued his systematic studies, acquiring 

 a fluent mastery of most of the European languages, and a considera- 

 ble acquaintance with a dozen more. Without these acquirements he 

 could not have done his work in comparative ethnology, as old trans- 

 lations, made before ethnological science was developed, were not only 

 often useless, but actually misleading. 



Dr. Tylor's first work, " Anahuac ; or Mexico and the Mexicans," 

 written at Cannes after his return from Mexico, was published in 1861. 

 It gave not only the important results of especial investigations and 

 excavations in Mexico, but it embodied the germ of a new department 

 of the new science of anthropology. As the author was not then 

 much known, and was dealing with a subject still comparatively un- 

 developed, and perhaps also from its unfortunate title, it did not meet 

 with a success at all proportionate to its undoubted merits. His " Re- 

 searches into the Early History of Mankind " appeared in 1865, and 



* Mr. Alfred Tylor published his first important geological paper in 1852, in "Silli- 

 man's Journal." The views it contains, though much opposed at the time, have been 

 quoted by A. R. Wallace in " Island Life," by Professor Huxley in his " Physiography," by 

 Darwin in his book on " Earth-Worms," and by Sir Charles Lyell in his text-books. 



