THE SCIENCE OF MAN: ITS NEEDS AND ITS 



TEOSPECTS. 1 



By Karl Pearson, F. R. S. 



Anthropology — the understanding of man — should be, if Pierre 

 Charron were correct, the true science and the true study of mankind. 2 

 We might anticipate that in our days — in this era of science — anthro- 

 pology in its broadest sense would occupy the same exalted position 

 that theology occupied in the Middle Ages. We should hail it "Queen 

 of the sciences," the crowning study of the academic curriculum. 

 Why is it that we are section H and not section A? If the answer 

 be given that such is the result of historic evolution, can we still be 

 satisfied with the position that anthropology at present takes up in 

 our British universities and in our learned societies? Have our uni- 

 versities, one and all, anthropological institutes well filled with en- 

 thusiastic students, and are there brilliant professors and lecturers 

 teaching them not only to understand man's past, but to use that 

 knowledge to forward his future? Have we men trained during a 

 long life of study and research to represent our science in the arena, 

 or do we largely trust to dilettanti — to retired civil servants, to un- 

 trained travelers or colonial medical men for our knowledge, and to 

 the anatomist, the surgeon, or the archeologist for our teaching? 

 Needless to say, that for the study of man we require the better part 

 of many sciences; we must draw for contributions on medicine, on 

 zoology, on anatomy, or archeology, on folk-lore and travel-lore, nay, 

 on history, psychology, geology, and many other branches of knowl- 

 edge. But a hotchpotch of the facts of these sciences does not create 

 anthropology. The true anthropologist is not the man who has 

 merely a wide knowledge of the conclusions of other sciences, he is 

 the man who grasps their bearing on mankind and throws light on 

 the past and present factors of human evolution from that knowledge. 



1 Presidential address to Section H of the British A- "ation for the Advancement of 

 Science, Cardiff, 1920. Reprinted by permission of +' ish Association. 



3 " La vraye science et le vray estude de l'homr l'Homme." Pierre Charron, 



De la Sagesse, Preface du Premier Livre, 1601. Pope, with his " The proper study of 

 mankind is Man," 1733, was, as we might anticipate, only a plagiarist. 



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