THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 475 



"type" and "variability" led to the application of the statistical 

 method, by means of which comparatively slight varieties can be 

 distinguished satisfactorily. By the application of this method, it 

 soon became apparent that the races of man could be subdivided 

 into types which were characteristic of definite geographical areas 

 and of the people inhabiting them. The same misinterpretation 

 developed here as was found among the linguists. As they identi- 

 fied language and people, so the anatomists identified somatic type 

 and people, and based their classification of peoples wholly on their 

 somatic characters. 



The two principles were soon found to clash. Peoples genetically 

 connected by language, or even the same in language, were found 

 to be diverse in type, and people of the same type proved to be 

 diverse in language. Furthermore, the results of classifications 

 according to cultural groups disagreed with both the linguistic and 

 the somatic classifications. In long and bitter controversies the 

 representatives of these three directions of anthropological research 

 contended for the correctness of their conclusions. This war of 

 opinions was fought out particularly on the ground of the so-called 

 Aryan question, and only gradually did the fact come to be under- 

 stood that each of these classifications is the reflection of a certain 

 group of facts. The linguistic classification records the historical 

 fates of languages and indirectly of the people speaking these lan- 

 guages; the somatic classification records the blood relationships of 

 groups of people, and thus traces another phase of their history; 

 while the cultural classification records historical events of still 

 another character, the diffusion of culture from one people to another 

 and the absorption of one culture by another. Thus it became clear 

 that the attempted classifications were expressions of historical data 

 bearing upon the unwritten history of races and peoples, and recorded 

 their descent, mixture of blood, changes of language, and develop- 

 ment of culture. Attempts at generalized classifications based on 

 these methods can claim validity only for that group of phenomena 

 to which the method applies. An agreement of their results that 

 is, original association between somatic type, language, and culture 

 must not be expected. Thus the historical view of anthropology 

 received support from the struggles between these three methods of 

 classification. 



We remarked before that the evolutionary method was based 

 essentially on the observation of the sameness of cultural traits 

 the world over. On the one hand, the sameness was assumed as 

 proof of a regular, uniform evolution of culture. On the other 

 hand, it was assumed to represent the elementary idea which 

 arises by necessity in the mind of man and which cannot be an- 

 alyzed, or as the earliest surviving form of human thought. 



