424 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



I am afraid I am a scientific heretic — an outcast from the true or- 

 thodox faith — I do not believe in science for its own sake. I believe 

 only in science for man's sake. You will hear on every side the ar- 

 gument that it is not the aim of science to be utile, that you must pur- 

 sue scientific studies for their own sake and not for the utility of the 

 resulting discoveries. I think that there is a great deal of obscurity 

 about this attitude, I will not say nonsense. I find the strongest sup- 

 porters of " science for its own sake " use as the main argument for 

 the pursuit of not immediately utile researches that these researches 

 will be useful some da} r , that we can never be certain when they will 

 turn out to be of advantage to mankind. Or, again, they will appeal 

 to non-utile branches of science as providing a splendid intellectual 

 training — as if the provision of highly trained minds was not itself a 

 social function of the greatest utility ! In other words, the argument 

 from utility is in both cases indirectly applied to justify the study 

 of science for its own sake. In the old days the study of hyper- 

 space — space of higher dimensions than that of which we have physi- 

 cal cognizance — used to be cited as an example of a non-utile scientific 

 research. In view of the facts: (i) that our whole physical outlook 

 on the universe — and with it I will add our whole philosophical and 

 theological outlooks — are taking new aspects under the theory of 

 Einstein; and (ii) that study of the relative influences of nature and 

 nurture in man can be reduced to the trigonometry of polyhedra in 

 hyperspace — we see how idle it is to fence off any field of scientific 

 investigation as nonutile. 



Yet are we to defend the past of anthropology — and, in particular, 

 of anthropometry — as the devotion of our science to an immediate 

 nonutile which one day is going to be utile in a glorious and epoch- 

 making manner, like the Clifford-Einstein suggestion of the curva- 

 ture of our space? I fear we can take no such flattering unction to 

 our souls. I fear that " the best is yet to be " can not be said of 

 our multitudinous observations on " height-sitting " or on the cen- 

 suses of eye- or hair-colors of our population. These things are dead 

 almost from the day of their record. It is not only because the bulk of 

 their recorders were untrained to observe and measure with scientific 

 accuracy, it is not only because the records in 9 out of 10 cases omit 

 the associated factors, without which the record is valueless. It is be- 

 cause the progress of mankind in its present stage depends on char- 

 acters wholly different from those which have so largely occupied 

 the anthropologist's attention. Seizing the superficial and easy to 

 observe, he has let slip the more subtle and elusive qualities on which 

 progress, on which national fitness for this or that task, essentially 

 depends. The pulse-tracing, the reaction-time, the mental age of the 

 men under his control, are far more important to the commanding 

 officer — nay, I will add, to the employer of labor — than any record 



