CHAPTER XIII 



STATISTICAL INVESTIGATIONS, ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD 

 TO ANTHROPOMETRY 



"Until the phenomena of any branch of Knowledge have been submitted to measurement 

 and number it cannot assume the status 'and dignity of a science." Francis Galton. 



A. STATISTICS IN THE SERVICE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 



There is no branch of knowledge to which Gallon's remark applies more 

 closely than anthropology; and there is certainly no field of researcli which 

 owes more to Galton than that of anthropometry and in particular that 

 branch of it which deals with craniometry. Here again as we have so often 

 had occasion to remark Galton's contribution was essentially one of method, 

 and lay in his insistence that the only way to permanent and safe deductions 

 was the path of measurement and number. The reader has only to examine 

 cniniological papers of the 'sixties or 'seventies, even by such authorities 

 of those days as Dr George Busk or Sir William Flower, to grasp iiow in- 

 definite and inconclusive craniometry was before it became permeated with 

 Galton's ideas of measurement and numlier. Half-a-dozen measurements on 

 half-a-dozen skulls .screened by a smoke-fog of vague remarks were considered 

 an adequate basis for attack on the most elusive problems of racial differ- 

 entiation. There was no conception of the iiuml)er of individuals or of the 

 number of characters which require to be measured before we can reach 

 definite conclusions. Anthropology was considered as a field to be left for a 

 recreation ground almost entirely to men busy in other matters, for it had 

 developed no academic discipline of its own, until Galton's methods gave it 

 the status and dignity of a real science. 



What troubled Galton, when travel and geography in the wider sense 

 had led him to anthropology, was not only the lack of quantitative method 

 but the lack also of ample material'. He at once set about supj)lying both 

 in his own original way. Yet having reached some certainty hunself he 

 proceeded, owing to the weakness of his brethren, in administering it only 

 m homoeopathic doses. At the Brighton British A.ssociation of 1872, a 

 recommendation was made by the General Committee, probably on Galton's 

 suggestion, that brief forms of instruction should be prepared tor travellers. 

 Two years later the Notes and Queries on Anthropvloiji/, for the Use of 

 Trat^ellers and Residents in uncivilised Lands, drawn up by the Committee 

 of the British Association (which included Lane Fox, Beddoe, Lubbock, 

 Tylor, Galton and uthei-s), was issued. To the first edition of this handbook 



' Neither lack was fully recognised even to Galton's death in many of the papers published 

 by the representative EngliHh Anthropological Society ; and I remember on more than one 

 occasion his Haying with a sigh : "Poor dear old Anthropological." All his efforts had produced 

 little if any impression upon its members. 



