ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 91 



its own in a permanent form. He collected the intermediate stages 

 through which a good rifle arose out of a bad one ; and the idea 

 began to cross his mind that the course of change which happened 

 to rifles was very much what ordinarily happens with other things. 



So he set about collecting, and filled his house from the cellar to 

 the attic, hanging on his walls series of all kinds of weapons and 

 other instruments which seemed to him to form links in a great 

 chain of development. The principle that thus became visible to 

 him in weapon-development is not less true through the whole range 

 of civilization ; and we shall soon be able to show to every anthro- 

 pologist who visits Oxford the results of that attempt. And when 

 the development theory is seen in that way, explaining the nature 

 and origin of our actual arts and customs and ideas, and their 

 gradual growth from ruder and earlier states of culture, then an- 

 thropology will come before the public mind as a new means of 

 practical instruction in life. 



Speaking of this aspect of anthropology leads me to say a word 

 on another hardly less important. On my first visit to this country, 

 nearly thirty years ago, I made a journey in Mexico with the late 

 Henry Christy, a man who impressed his personality very deeply 

 on the science of man. He was led into this subject by his con- 

 nection with Dr. Hodgkin ; the two being at first interested, from 

 the philanthropist's point of view, in the preservation of the less 

 favored races of man, and taking part in a society for this purpose 

 known as the Aborigines' protection society. The observation of 

 the indigenous tribes for philanthropic reasons brought the fact into 

 view that such peoples of low culture were in themselves of the high- 

 est interest as illustrating the whole problem of stages of civilization ; 

 and this brought about the establishment of the Ethnological So- 

 ciety in England, Henry Christy's connection with which origin- 

 ated his plan of forming an ethnological museum. The foundations 

 of the now celebrated Christy collection were laid on our Mexican 

 journey; and I was witness to his extraordinary power of knowing, 

 untaught, what it was the business of an anthropologist to collect, 

 and what to leave uncollected : how very useless for anthropologic 

 purposes mere curiosities are, and how priceless are every-day things. 

 The two principles which tend most to the successful work of an- 

 thropology — the systematic collection' of the products of each stage 

 of civilization, and the arrangement of their sequence in develop- 

 ment — are thus the leading motives of our two great anthropological 

 museum. 



