632 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ciation issued a list of queries, and students of special subjects liave 

 catechised missionaries and other residents abroad. 



On these foundations has been reared what Max Mliller disdain- 

 fully names agriology, what the late Mr. Freeman, the historian, 

 invidiously styled " Mr. Taylor's science," and what is, in fact, the 

 science of sociology. In its pre-scientific stage it consisted of pre- 

 mature generalizations on an insufficient basis of facts, such as are to 

 be found in the still interesting works of Goguet and De Brosses, 

 Monboddo and Kaimes. Sometimes it gave rise to a great idea in 

 other sciences. Observing the poverty-stricken flora and fauna of 

 Australia, Cook mused on the agencies which kept the Australians 

 within the limits of subsistence. His speculations dropped in Mal- 

 thus's pregnant mind the seed of the law of population. As is better 

 known, that law put into Darwin's hands the key to organic evolu- 

 tion. Cook begat Malthus and Malthus begat Darwin — that is the 

 genealogy of natural selection. Special researches began. Prof. 

 John Millar's Origin of Ranks, of which the third edition was pub- 

 lished so long ago as 1781, shows how near a man may be to a dis- 

 covery without making it. Only after eighty years did his inchoate 

 speculation issue in the most finished piece of inductive research that 

 sociology has to show — ^McLennan's Primitive Marriage. Mr. Tylor, 

 the best-equipped and most judicious of contemporary sociographers, 

 has skillfully tracked social phenomena on a dozen different lines all 

 round the globe. And these pioneers have been followed by a host 

 of explorers, from Florence to Stocldiolm and from Moscow to San 

 Francisco. Systematic science at last arrives. Comte named and 

 rightly placed sociology in the circle, or the tree, of the sciences, and 

 his prior treatise is enriched with a wealth of thought unequaled 

 since Montesquieu. But his construction is vitiated by the mechan- 

 ical conception of society that bore such Dead Sea fruit in the Poli- 

 tique; and without the indispensable foundations supplied by a 

 study of primitive peoples it is a mere " Spanish castle," a structure 

 in the air. A vital conception of society and the tracing of existing 

 institutions, rites, and ideas to their roots in these peoples made Her- 

 bert Spencer the true founder of sociology. The carving out of the 

 social subsciences — a task that baffled the keen intellect of Mill — 

 was struck off by this great thinker at a heat. The classification 

 which forms the skeleton of his Descriptive Sociology is an analytical 

 masterpiece that evoked the enthusiasm of Taine. As it has already 

 been made by two able assistants (Dr. Duncan and Dr. Scheppig) 

 the framework of exhaustive descriptions of the savage and semi- 

 civilized races, so will it be the schema of all future sociological re- 

 search. 



Art as well as science has been born of the contact with indigenes. 



