20 W. J. MCGEE 



Morgan laid the foundation for objective sociology in his 

 work on Ancient Society in 1877, while the Frenchman Comte 

 formulated a subjective sociology, and the Briton Spencer 

 pushed forward his imposing folios on Descriptive Sociology. 

 Then came the creation of the Bureau of American Ethnology 

 in 1879, and the beginning of the classification of the Amer- 

 ican aborigines by human activities rather than by animal 

 features. So arose a new ethnology, in which men are 

 classified by mind rather than by body, by culture rather 

 than by color; and the rise marked the most notable ad- 

 vance in the history of anthropology. Under this classifi- 

 cation, the peoples of the earth fall into four culture grades, 

 which are also stages in development, namely: (1) savagery, 

 with a social organization resting on kinship reckoned in the 

 female line; (2) barbarism, in which the social organization 

 is based on kinship reckoned in the male line; (3) civiliza- 

 tion, in which the organization has a territorial basis ; and (4) 

 enlightenment, in which the laws and customs are based on 

 intellectual rights. 



The principal advance in anthropology was distinctly 

 American; it grew out of conditions existing alone on this 

 continent, and could not well have originated elsewhere; 

 indeed, it is not yet fully appreciated in any other country. 

 Like the American geologist, the cisatlantic anthropolo- 

 gist found the finest field the world affords. With a pop- 

 ulation coming from every European country, with an ab- 

 original people of threescore tongues and a thousand tribes 

 always on his frontier, with the denizens of the dark conti- 

 nent long chained to his footstool, with representatives of 

 China and Japan and the islands of the seas constantly com- 

 peting in his industries, and with a more extensive and in- 

 timate blending of bloods than any student had seen before, 

 his opportunities for testing ethnic principles were unpar- 

 alleled; when lost in the labyrinth of meaningless distinctions 

 of color and hair, of cranial form and capacity, of stature and 

 length of limb, and in need of new criteria, he was inspired 

 to note what men do rather than what they are, and soon 

 followed the physicist and the chemist and the geologist 

 into kinetic interpretation. Then he found a third of 



