562 ETHNOLOGY 



Whatever department of esthetology is studied, not merely must 

 the objects or facts be collected, and their significance ascertained, 

 but ever must one remember that they all have a psychological 

 significance, and this too must be studied in the field; a highly sug- 

 gestive presentation of this aspect will be found in Hirn's Origins 

 of Art. 



Technology. The study of what man makes and how he makes 

 it, is one that has appealed to many workers. Our museums are 

 full of weapons and utensils, but in numbers of instances our know- 

 ledge about them is very imperfect. The localities from which 

 objects are supposed to come are frequently vague and occasionally 

 incorrect; the exact materials of which they are made, and the 

 method in which they are made are rarely recorded. There are 

 extremely few sets of photographs that illustrate all the stages in 

 the making of an object; this latter is an important point, as the 

 manufacture of primitive implements is fast disappearing. For such 

 purposes the cinematograph might very well be employed by the 

 ethnologist in addition to ordinary photography. 



Sociology. The progress of all cultural peoples has depended 

 primarily upon social habits, and the tracing of this evolution is one 

 of the most important tasks that the ethnologist has to accomplish. 

 In taking a general survey of the literature of comparative socio- 

 logy, one is at first sight inclined to think that a fairly adequate 

 amount of information has been collected; but when one begins to 

 analyze the material a very different impression is arrived at. The 

 statements are found to be too general and to lack precision in 

 detail. Among less advanced peoples the communities are usually 

 rigidly organized, and definite duties are allocated to certain individ- 

 uals according to their position in the community at large or accord- 

 ing to their kinship. In order to gain a thorough knowledge of the 

 construction of any society, it is essential that these several duties 

 should be clearly recorded, and exact information should be given 

 concerning the individuals by whom they are performed. It is 

 precisely in such details that most accounts hopelessly break down. 

 As the social structure of many peoples has been shattered by con- 

 tact with Europeans it is of the greatest importance that an effort 

 should be made to recover this class of information; in many cases 

 it is probably already too late, but in others it is possible that 

 something may yet be saved. As a matter of fact, a very large 

 proportion of the earlier observations on the sociology of native 

 races requires to be confirmed and amplified. 



Philology, or Linguistics, deals not so much with languages as 

 with language, its origin, nature, and laws, and in addition to the 

 spoken language the ethnologist studies gesture- and sign-language, 

 as well as pictographic, symbolic, ideographic, and phonetic writing. 



