Il8 MCGEE 



The President said : 



To the administration of the rapidly expanding Geological 

 Survey was conjoined that of the Bureau of Ethnology. If this 

 was a smaller and weaker child, it ever received his tenderest 

 care and was probably his greatest delight. One might not 

 inappropriately say that it cheered his declining years and 

 received his last blessing. Starting in early j^ears with the 

 study of inanimate nature and the lower forms of life, it was 

 almost inevitable that this broad and profound investigator 

 should pass on to the study of man himself and all his activi- 

 ties. It is probably in the nature of things that this subject 

 should not appeal strongly to a young and vigorous nation, 

 bent on realizing by the shortest cut its own high destiny, and 

 the fact that this bureau prospered for twenty three years under 

 the administration of Major Powell, its founder, is eloquent tes- 

 timony to his genius for directorship and guidance. 



Mr. W J McGee, his associate and administrative support in 

 his later years, will give to us his estimate of Major Powell as 

 an anthropologist. 



POWELL AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST. 



Mr. McGee said : 



As a citizen of the Republic, Powell was a patriot ; as a 

 soldier, he was a hero ; as an explorer, he was a leader of brave 

 men ; as a geologist, he was a master among the builders of the 

 science ; but it was as an anthropologist that he came to his 

 best — for he was, more than any other, the maker of the 

 broad Science of Man. 



As a student of human kind, John Wesley Powell ranks 

 among the leading figures of history ; his place can be defined 

 only in terms of great men and the greater epochs in the growth 

 of human knowledge. 



In the first epoch of that consciously organized knowledge 

 now called Science, men slowly summed their experiences of 

 the fixed features of sky and then of earth, and thus shaped 

 those sciences still called exact because they deal so largely 

 with the constants of Nature ; then knowledge advanced by 

 centuries of uniform experiences, and the more variable factors 



