ANTHROPOLOGY. 515 



globe, where the conditions are unique, as in the writings of A. Bastian ; 

 or we could study out the industries of a race, a nation, a sect, wher- 

 ever in time or i)lace they may have lived. 



One of the most profitable series of investigations into the origin of 

 form and decoration in the arts is a series of i)apers by W. H. Holmes, 

 published by the Bureau of Ethnology. Mr. Holmes finds a little frag- 

 ment of pottery in the fields around Washington. This tells him that 

 the aborigines knew the ceramic art. By pressing on the surface a 

 piece of artist's clay he gets the impress of woven texture. This tells 

 that these aborigines were weavers, and it is very easy to see what kind 

 of weavers they were. It also tells how they decorated pottery. Thus, 

 by piecing art to art, fragment to fragment, the author is able to recon- 

 struct the daily life of an extinct people ; to ascertain how the invent- 

 ive faculty has caught up one suggestion of dame nature after another, 

 and then technic laziness has reduced the full form to conventionalisms 

 and abbreviations. Herr Schaaffhausen has caught up the same idea 

 and published "Entwickelung des menschlicheu Hand werks und den 

 Einfluss des Stoftes auf die Kunstform." 



Next to the subject of invention and the stimulus thereto by means 

 of patents the subject of learning a trade, of industrial training, 

 demands the careful study of the anthropologists. It is easy to follow 

 up the methods of our own day, but our chief inquiry is how things 

 came to be as they are. Such papers as that of G. P. Morris on indus- 

 trial training two centuries ago will be hailed with pleasure by com- 

 parative technologists. 



The only way to illustrate and to study this branch of anthropology 

 is by means of the museum, the gallery or cabinet of drawings, and the 

 specifications. If one would follow up an art he must collect material, 

 he must supply himself with many pictures, he must have his card cat- 

 alogue or files of ready reference, and all these must be movable and 

 interchangeable. 



In the U. S. National Museum there are many series of objects in- 

 stalled to show the natural history of invention, such as naval archi- 

 tecture, land transportation, fishing, music, pottery, cutlery, weapous. 

 These are of especial interest to craftsmen, who find no difliculty in 

 reading the history of their daily occupations. 



It IS not necessary to enumerate the names of all the arts about which 

 books have been written in 1887-88. A glance at the list of titles 

 proves that some one has been fascinated with nearly every occupation 

 of mankind. The unit chapter on this subject, the technographic unit 

 IS an art of a people. If these be well written they may be allowed to 

 tell their story in two directions, either as a part of the whole history 

 ot a peo])le or as a part of the whole history of an art. If Mr. Sato has 

 written a work on Japanese farming, it may be filed away under farm- 

 ing or under Japanese, according to the ruling motive in the mind of the 



