,9o8] BALCH— ART AND ETHNOLOGY. 33 



omy. It will be a science in which art critics and ethnologists w-ill 

 have to work hand in hand ; it will either have to be worked out by 

 trained artists and also by ethnologists, or better still, comparative 

 art must be handled by men who are something of specialists in 

 both fields. 



Comparative art should not be confounded with comparative 

 archeolog}-. Although there are points of contact, the fields are 

 different. Comparative archeolog}- is mainly based on the results 

 of digging with the pick and the spade. It includes studies of cer- 

 tain phases of art and architecture, of inscriptions, of implements, 

 and some other things. It does not deal with the work of the 

 Eskimo, or the Australian, or the Ashantee of to-day. It is a study 

 of past things. 



Comparative art, on the contrary, must deal, not only with the 

 past, but also with the present. It will not be a study of written 

 inscriptions, nor of implements, but it will be a study of art, and 

 architecture so far as this is a form of the fine arts, and it must be 

 applied to every district of the globe, not only to the remotest past 

 in which there was art, but to the actual present of to-day and to 

 the future. It will deal not only W'ith the art of the Pleistokenes 

 and the Assyrians, of the Chinese and the Aztecs, but also with the 

 art of the tribes now living in the Amazon and Kongo forests, in 

 the islands of the Pacific, and on the shores of the Arctic. 



Now I do not wish to claim that the study of art specimens is 

 going to clear up all the problems of ethnolog)', or do away with 

 other methods of studying man and his history, or anything else of 

 that kind. I only want to say that here is a field still mainly untilled, 

 in which there is much work to be done, and from which, when it 

 is properly plowed up, a valuable crop of scientific data may be 

 expected. 



That comparative art will bring up new problems and perhaps 

 alter some theories of the present seems probable. For instance, it 

 was formerly generally accepted that there are five races of men : a 

 white, a yellow, a brown, a red and a black. Then other theories 

 w-ere started : one that there are only three races, a white, a yellow 

 and a black ; and another that there are four races, a white, a yellow, 

 a red and a black. A study of the art of the world, however, tends 



