LARGER PROBLEMS OF ANTHROPOLOGY 451 



geometric designs and arbitrary characters, a system of almaca- 

 bala the earth-placed twin of sky-set astrology took a course 

 still marked by the ancient hieroglyphs of many lands. In the 

 fullness of time (and primitive progress was tedious beyond tell- 

 ing), astronomy grew out of astrology as the first of the sciences, 

 leaving a large residuum of mythology behind. In like manner, 

 and at about the same stage (i. e., about the birth-time of writing), 

 algorithm and algebra came out of almacabala, leaving a residuum 

 of black art and white magic, jugglery and enchantment; and as the 

 algorithm grew into arithmetic and wizardly geomancy gave way 

 to scholarly geometry, mathematics took shape as the complement 

 of astronomy and these sisters twain were nurses and teachers of 

 all the younger sciences. Still the caldron of inchoate knowledge 

 boiled and bubbled with Macbethian pother, and the foul fumes of 

 black magic long concealed the few germs of real knowledge shaped 

 by the steady pressure of actual experience for this was the time 

 of alchemy, whose slimy spume at last slipped away from chemistry, 

 the third of the sciences. 



Astronomy led writing (as the constellations attest), while 

 mathematics followed close on writing and records, as its symbols 

 show, and both belonged to what may be called the Naissance of 

 Knowledge; chemistry appeared during the same period, bear- 

 ing the prophecy of physics caught by Archimedes, yet remained 

 a helpless weakling the foil and puppet of medievalism - 

 throughout the whole of the Dark Ages; but during the Renais- 

 sance the trio of elder sciences gained strength together and as- 

 sumed lasting dominion over the realm of knowledge. Because 

 their birth dates back to or beyond the beginning of records, the 

 early stages of these sciences are imperfectly written; but the 

 youngest science, anthropology, buys methods and principles 

 from the more exact elders and pays amply in coin of history; 

 for by tracing the careers of later-born or slower-grown folk and 

 cults, anthropologists learn to retrace the lost steps in the careers 

 of ancestral peoples and early cultures. Here lie some of the re- 

 lations between anthropology and the elder sciences; she receives 

 exact methods tested by millenniums of experience, and gives 

 interpretations of the ideas and motives, the arts and accomplish- 

 ments, the modes of thought and the stages of progress, of the 

 earliest science-makers. Astronomy and mathematics and chem- 

 istry are systems of knowledge produced by men and minds, 

 anthropology is systematic knowledge of these producers; and 

 neither the old sciences nor the new can be rendered complete 

 and stable without the support of the others. 



The science of sentient man of man as a thinking and col- 

 lective organism helps to illumine the Dark Ages no less than 



