442 PROCEEDINGS OP SECTION G. 



Section G.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 



President of the Section, Mr. Alan Carroll, M.A., M.D. 



Wednesday, August 29. 

 The President, Mr. Alan Carroll, M.A., M.D., in the Chair. 



The following papers were read : — 



1. —OUTLINES OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 



By John J. Wild, Ph.D., F.R G.S., Melbourne. 



Anthropology is one of the new sciences which owe their origin 

 to the intense intellectual activity characteristic of the Ninteenth 

 Century. The term is usually interpreted to mean, "The Science of 

 Man," and to an outsider it may appear strange that man should 

 be deemed for the first time a tit subject of scientific investiga- 

 tion, considering that he has been meditated upon, examined into, 

 and experimented upon, fi'om the remotest ages down to the 

 present day. It is this generally entertained notion that we know 

 all about him, or the contrary opinion, that we shall never be able 

 to arrive at any definite and exhaustive insight into that myste- 

 rious compound of good and evil, which have been the chief 

 obstacles to an unprejudiced and strictly scientific treatment of 

 this important and universally interesting question. 



If Anthropology claims to be admitted to the rank of a positive 

 science, it is because it professes to have discovered a new method 

 of investigation, by means of which it hopes to attain results of 

 a sufficiently definite charcter to throw a new light upon the 

 nature of the being which it has undertaken to analyse, and to 

 explain. The field of inquiry occupied by the Anthropologist 

 coincides to a large extent with the domains hitherto appropriated 

 by the historian, the philologist, the antiquarian, and the ethno- 

 logist, by all of whom a vast store of material has been gathered 

 and stored up in our libraries and museums. It is not intended to 

 displace these predecessors of and co-operators in anthropological 

 research. On the contrary, the principal object of Anthropo- 

 logical science is to concentrate, as it were, in a focus all the 

 information collected up to this date by their separate labours, 

 and to project these combined lights upon man in such a wp,y as 

 to make him stand out from his surroundings a clearly defined 

 and strongly illumined figure, displaying all these characteristics 

 by which man has always been known to himself, but of which until 

 now he has had only a dim perception. In other words, the method 

 pursued by previous inquirers has been mainly . historical and 

 descriptive, that of the Anthropologist professes to be strictly 



