CHAPTEE XIII. 

 Advance of Anthropology.* 



The Subject. — Anthropology has mankind for its 

 subject, just as ornithology deals with bird-kind and 

 entomology with insect-kind. It is, from one point 

 of view, a specialised department of zoology, deal- 

 ing with one particular species — Man, and it applies 

 zoological methods to the study of human variations 

 and modifications, and to the interpretation of the 

 characteristic features in structure, habit, and social 

 organisation which distinguish the different human 

 races. It is, from another point of view, concerned 

 with what may be called the prolegomena to the 

 scientific study of history, for through linguistics, 

 folk-lore, and the study of the ancient (often pre- 

 historic) remains of human activity it passes grad- 

 ually into the historical discipline, in the narrower 

 and stricter sense, which takes to do with the period 

 of which we have intentional records. 



Anthropology is, like geography, a synthesis or 

 combination of contributions from a number of 

 sciences towards the interpretation of a particular 

 problem — the human species as such. " We must 

 be prepared to take anthropology more as the study 

 of man in relation to various and often independent 



* The aim of this chapter is simply to indicate six of the 

 most important problems which have engaged the attention 

 of anthropologists during the nineteenth century. 



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