THE SCIENCE OF MAN — PEARSON. 439 



offer to the young man who for a moment considers it as a possible 

 academic study ? There are no professional posts at present open to 

 him, and few academic posts. 10 There is little to attract the young 

 man to anthropology as a career. Is its position as a training of 

 mind any stronger? The student knows if he studies physics or 

 chemistry or engineering that he will obtain a knowledge of the 

 principles of observation, of measurement, and of the interpretation 

 of data which will serve him in good stead whenever he has to deal 

 with phenomena of any kind. But, alas ! in anthropology, while he 

 finds many things of surpassing interest, he discovers no generally 

 accepted methods of attacking new problems, quot homines, tot sen- 

 tential. The type of man we want in anthropology is precisely the 

 man who now turns to mathematics, to physics, and to astronomy — 

 the man with an exact mind who will not take statements on authority 

 and who believes in testing all things. To such a man anthropom- 

 etry — in all its branches, craniometry, psychometry, and the wide 

 field in which body and mind are tested together under dynamic con- 

 ditions — forms a splendid training, provided his data and observa- 

 tions are treated as seriously as those of the physicist or astronomer 

 by adequate mathematical analysis. Such a type of man is at once 

 repelled from our science if he finds in its textbooks and journals 

 nothing but what has been fitly termed " kindergarten arithmetic." 

 Why, the other day I saw in a paper by a distinguished anthropolo- 

 gist an attempt to analyse how many individual bones he ought to 

 measure. He adopted the simple process of comparing the results 

 he obtained when he took 10, 20, 30 individuals. He was not really 

 wiser at the end of his analysis than at the beginning, though he 

 thought he was. And this, notwithstanding that the whole matter 

 has been thrashed out scientifically by John Bernoulli two centuries 

 ago, and that its solution is a commonplace of physicists and as- 

 tronomers ! 



How can we expect the scientific world to take us seriously and to 

 treat anthropology as the equal of other sciences while this state of 

 affairs is possible? What discipline in logical exactness are we 

 offering to academic youth which will compare with that of the older 

 sciences? What claim have we to advise- the State until we have intro- 

 duced a sounder technique and ceased to believe that anthropometry 

 is a science that any man can follow, with or without training? As 

 I have hinted, the problems of anthropology seem to me as subtle as 

 those of physical astronomy, and we are not going to solve them with 

 rusty weapons, nor solve them at all unless we can persuade the 

 " brainy boys " of our universities that they are worthy of keen 



10 In London, for example, there is a reader in physical anthropology who is a teacher 

 in anatomy, and a professorship in ethnology, which for some mysterious reason is in- 

 cluded in the faculty of economics and is, I believe, not a full-time appointment. 



