DEPARTMENT XIV ANTHROPOLOGY 



(Hall 8, September 20, 2 p. m.) 



CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR FREDERIC W. PUTNAM, Harvard University. 

 SPEAKERS: DR. W J McGEE, Director of the Public Museum, St. Louis. 

 PROFESSOR FRANZ BOAS. Columbia University. 



ANTHROPOLOGY AND ITS LARGER PROBLEMS 



BY W J MCGEE 



[W J McGee, Director of the St. Louis Public Museum, b. Farley, Dubuque 

 County, Iowa, April 17, 1853. Self-educated. Land surveyor, 1874-76; Student 

 of geology and archeology, 1877-81; made geologic and topographic survey 

 of Northeastern Iowa, 1878-82; Reported upon building-stones of Iowa for 

 Tenth Census, 1881-82; Geologist, United States Geological Survey, 1883-93; 

 Ethnologist in charge of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1893-1903; Chief 

 of 



1903-05. 

 National 



Washington; Acting President of the American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science; Vice-President of Archeological Institute of America; senior 

 U. S. Commissioner in American International Commission of Archeology and 

 Ethnology. Author of Pleistocene History of North Eastern Iowa; Geology of 

 Chesapeake Bay; The Lafayette Formation; The Potable Waters of Eastern 

 United States; The Siouan Indians; Primitive Trephining in Peru; The Seri 

 Indians; and numerous scientific memoirs, and several hundred minor articles.] 



YOUNGEST in the sisterhood of sciences, anthropology borrows 

 principles and methods from all the older branches of knowledge; 

 and her first problem a problem renewed with each step of ad- 

 vance, and hence endless as the problem of quarry to the hunts- 

 man or of crop to the planter is that of determining her own 

 relations in the realm of knowledge, her own place and powers in 

 the intellectual world. 



Viewed in the light of history, it is no accident that anthropo- 

 logy is the youngest of the sciences; for it is the way of know- 

 ledge to begin with the remote and come down to the near to 

 start with the stars, linger amid the mountains, rest awhile among 

 rare gems, and only slowly approach such commonplace things as 

 plants and animals and soils, to end at last with man. How growing 

 knowledge has pursued paths leading from the remote to the near, 

 from the rare to the common, from the abnormal to the normal, 

 from the unreal to the real, from wonder to wisdom, indeed, 

 from chaos to cosmos and from star to man, all this is history; 

 why these paths have been pursued may well remain a problem until 

 more is known of the constitution of the human brain and of the 

 laws of mind. 



