THE COMING OF EVOLUTION 223 



climes into the European gardens and museums, 

 brought back the artistic and industrial products of 

 other people and the ceremonial objects of other 

 religions, in all stages of development. First as a 

 source of wonder and interest, then as a matter for 

 commiseration and missionary enterprise, and finally 

 as objects of admiration, study, and investigation, we 

 of the West have come into contact with older civiliza- 

 tions than our own older in origins, older and far 

 anterior to our own in the sequence of the ages. 



The ingenious diplomatist who enriched our British 

 Museum with the sculptures of the Parthenon, the 

 men who first brought back from Asia Minor and 

 Babylonia the spoils of earlier ancient empires, were 

 not anthropologists in our present sense of the word. 

 They were true treasure-seekers pirates and buc- 

 caneers of the Northern art world at best, bent on 

 confirming, for their own satisfaction, the most striking 

 passages of the classical historians who ruled in the 

 schools of the period. The plunder of their Eastern 

 voyages was deposited in the capitals of Western 

 Europe ; trophies of the chase, which have taught 

 us that art is but one aspect of the development of the 

 human mind as a record, incomplete in itself and 

 that history is but the detailed account of human 

 evolution, as its progress appears to the subjects of 

 the experiment. Thus, when the anthropologists 

 were ready to take the field, much of the necessary 

 material was at hand, already familiar, or partially 

 classified, awaiting only the new gift of reinterpreta- 

 tion to give up another aspect of its inward meaning. 



As an example of modern methods and results we 

 may take the analysis of the population of Europe, 



