440 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



minds. Hence it seems to me that the most fertile training for 

 academic purposes in anthropology is that which starts from anthro- 

 pometry in its broadest sense, which begins to differentiate caste 

 and class and race, bodily and mental health and disease, by measure- 

 ment and by the analysis of measurement. Once this sound ground- 

 ing has been reached the trained mind may advance to ethnology and 

 sociology, to prehistory and the evolution of man. And I shall be 

 surprised if equal accuracy of statement and equal logic of deduction 

 be not then demanded in these fields, and I am more than half con- 

 vinced, nay, I am certain, that the technique the student will apply 

 in anthropometry can be equally well applied in the wider fields 

 into which he will advance in his later studies. Give anthropology 

 a technique as accurate as that of physics, and it will forge ahead as 

 physics has done, and then anthropologists will take their due place 

 in the world of science and in the service of the State. 



Francis Galton has a claim upon the attention of anthropolo- 

 gists which I have not. He has been President of your Institute, and 

 he spoke just 35 years ago from the chair I now occupy, pressing 

 on you for the first time the claims of new anthropological methods. 

 In Galton's words: "Until the phenomena of any branch of knowl- 

 edge have been submitted to measurement and number it can not 

 assume the status and dignity of a science." Have we not rather for- 

 gotten those warning words, and do they not to some extent explain 

 why our universities and learned societies, why the State and states- 

 men, have turned the cold shoulder on anthropology? 



This condition of affairs must not continue ; it is good neither for 

 anthropology, nor for the universities, nor for the State if this 

 fundamental science, the science of man, remains in neglect. It will 

 not continue if anthropologists pull together and insist that their 

 problems shall not fail in utility, that their scientific technique shall 

 be up to date, and that anthropological training shall be a reality 

 in our universities — that these shall be fully equipped with museums, 

 with material, with teachers and students. 



It is almost as difficult to reform a science as it is to reform a 

 religion; in both cases the would-be reformer will offend the sacro- 

 sanct upholders of tradition, who find it hard to discard the faith in 

 which they have been reared. But it seems to me that the difficulties 

 of our time plead loudly for a broadening of the purpose and a 

 sharpening of the weapons of anthropology. If we elect to stand 

 where we have done, then a new science will respond to the needs of 

 state and society ; it will spring from medicine and psychology, it will 

 be the poorer in that it knows little of man's development, little of his 

 history or prehistory. But it will devote itself to the urgent prob- 

 lems of the day. The future lies with the nation that most truly 



