432 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



still maintain her trade by aid of consuls, missionaries, traders, 

 travelers, and others trained academically to understand both 

 savage and civilized peoples. This is a perfectly fair field, and if 

 the game be played squarely can solely lead to increased human 

 sympathy, and we shall only have ourselves to blame if other na- 

 tions are before us in their anthropological knowledge and its prac- 

 tical applications. The first condition for State support is that we 

 show our science to be utile by turning to the problems of racial 

 efficiency and of race psj-chology, and to all those tasks that Galton 

 described as the first duty of a nation — " in short, to make every in- 

 dividual efficient both through nature and by nurture." 



Does this mean that we are to turn our backs on the past, to 

 desert all our prehistoric studies and to make anthropology the 

 servant of sanitation and commerce? Not in the least; if you think 

 this is my doctrine I have indeed failed to make myself even roughly 

 clear to-day. Such teaching is wholly opposed to my view of the 

 function of science. I feel quite convinced that you can not under- 

 stand man of to-day, savage or civilized, his body or his mind, unless 

 you know his past evolution, unless you have studied fully all the 

 scanty evidence we have of the stages of his ascent. I should like 

 to illustrate this by an incident which came recently to my notice, 

 because it may indicate to some of those present the difficulties with 

 which the anthropologist has to contend to avoid misunderstanding. 



Looking into the ancestry of man and tracing him backward to a 

 being who was not man and was not ape, we ask had this prot-simio- 

 human, in the light of our present knowledge, more resemblance to the 

 gibbon or to the chimpanzee as we know them to-day? Some nat- 

 uralists link man up to the apes by a gibbonlike form, others by a 

 troglod}'te t}'pe of ancestor. Some would make a push to do without 

 either. But granted the alternative, which is the more probable? 

 This is the problem of the hylobatic or the troglod3 T te origin of man. 

 I had given a lecture on the subject, confining my arguments solely to 

 characters of the thigh-bone. Now there chanced to be a statesman 

 present, a man who has had large responsibilities in the government 

 of many races. I have been honored by seeing his comments on my 

 lecture. " I am not," he says, " particularly interested in the descent 

 of man. I do not believe much in heredity, and this scientific 

 pursuit of the dead bones of the past does not seem to me a very 

 useful way of spending life. I am accustomed to this mode of study ; 

 learned volumes have been written in Sanscrit to explain the con- 

 junction of the two vowels ' a ' and ' u.' It is very learned, very 

 ingenious, but not very helpful. * * * I am not concerned with 

 my genealogy so much as with my future. Our intellects can be more 

 advantageously employed than in finding our diversity from the ape 

 * * *. There may be no spirit, no soul ; there is no proof of their 



