president's address — SECTION G. 145 



The study of tliat particular lino to which I devoted 

 myself — the structure of the most Ancient Society — seems to 

 me to be specially adapted to the leisure hours of a busy life. 

 It requires no laboratory ; it demands neither costly apparatus 

 nor staft' of assistants ; it does not even need many books. 

 A few volumes will show the student what is wanted in this 

 particular line ; and if he prefer to take up any other corner 

 of the vast anthropological field, Dr. Tylor's admirable 

 manual, entitled " Anthropolog-y : An Introduction to the 

 Study of Man and CiviHsation," will lay a wide choice 

 before him. 



Then, again, good work in this line can be done without 

 any special training. Any fairly intelligent man who is 

 willing to give patient study to it, cannot fail to do work of 

 solid value. Not, indeed, work that will pay from a 

 university examiner's point of view, for our universities offer 

 nothing to the student of Anthropology — Greek roots to 

 tiiem are more precious than are the roots from which Attic 

 society grew — but work that is of great value as ministering 

 to that kind of education which teaches the student to know. 



It is a mistake to suppose that this study would be an 

 addition to the burdens of the already overburdened student. 

 " It will be found," Dr. Tylor well says, " that the real 

 effect of Anthropology is rather to lighten than to increase 

 the strain of learning. The science of man and civilisation 

 connects into a more manageable whole the scattered subjects 

 of an ordinary education. Much of the difficulty of learning 

 and teaching lies in the scholar's not seeing clearly what 

 each science and art is for — what its jilace is among the 

 purposes of life. If he knows something of its early history, 

 and how it arose from the simpler wants and circumstances of 

 mankind, he finds himself better able to lay hold of it than 

 when, as too often happens, he is called upon to take up an 

 abstruse subject, not at the beginning of it, but in the middle. 

 The dislike of so many beginners to geometry as ex))Ounded 

 by Euclid, arising from the fact that not one out of three 

 ever readily understands what he is doing, is, of all things, 

 due to the scholar not being shown first the practical 

 common-sense starting-point, where the old carpenters and 

 builders began to make out the relations of distances and 

 spaces in their work. So, also, the law student plunges at 

 once into the intricacies of legal systems which have grown 

 up through the struggles, the reforms, and even the blunders 

 of thousands of years ; yet he might have made his way 



