igos.] BALCH— ART AND ETHNOLOGY. 31 



Some use has been made of this class of evidence ; nevertheless, it is 

 far below what it should be and usually it is only local in its deduc- 

 tions. There are plenty of treatises relating to the art of the white 

 races, of the modern Europeans, of the Romans, of the Greeks ; some 

 on Egyptian art ; others on Kaldean art and Assyrian art ; some on 

 Old Mexican art and Peruvian art, and so forth. But so little is 

 the subject worked out even locally, that there is practically no 

 special publication about African art or Brazilian art, and it is only 

 within the twentieth century that we find the first serious attempt 

 to trace back the wonderful art of China. As a subject of study, 

 either from an artistic or an ethnological standpoint, the art of the 

 world as a whole is so far almost untouched. Even in such an excel- 

 lent recent art history as Mr. S. Reinach's " Art Throughout the 

 Ages," one finds that by art he means European art alone and that 

 Hindu art or Chinese art or Mexican art are left out in the cold. 

 Whether art comes from only one center or whether there are sev- 

 eral foci of dispersion; what relations, what resemblances, and what 

 dififerences there are in the art of the world as a whole, is as yet an 

 almost virgin field. If I am not mistaken, only one attempt has 

 been made (by the writer himself) to study and classify art in every 

 district of the globe. 



Probably the main reason why art in totality is still so largely 

 unstudied is that it is only recently that art specimens from every- 

 where have been collected, placed in museums, and made accessible. 

 But, connected with this placing of art specimens in museums, there 

 is a curious fact which shows that the art of the world, at present, 

 appears to hang in a sort of borderland between art and science. 

 The specimens are divided. Some are placed in art museums, others 

 in ethnological museums. For instance, in Philadelphia, art speci- 

 mens are divided between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine 

 Arts and the University Archeological Museum; in Washington, 

 between the Corcoran Gallery and the United States National Mu- 

 seum ; in New York, between the Metropolitan Museum and the 

 American Museum of Natural History; in Boston, between the 

 Museum of Fine Arts and the Cambridge Peabody Museum. There 

 is no place where anyone can go and get a comprehensive view of 

 art from all over the world. 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC. XLVII. l88 C, PRINTED JULY lO, I908. 



