Bureau of American Ethnology 373 



mankind among each other as individuals and tribes, as well 

 as to the other peoples of the world. 



The operations have varied from time to time with condi- 

 tions, including official requirements, administrative necessi- 

 ties, and the demands of growing science. The most potent 

 of these conditions in shaping the operations of the bureau 

 was an official demand to which the institution of the bureau 

 was a partial response. Statesmen and administrative offi- 

 cers concerned with placing the Indians on reservations felt 

 the need of a practical classification of the Indian tribes under 

 which they might be arranged in amicable groups; this need 

 was urged on Major Powell while Director of the Rocky 

 Mountain Survey, and the anthropological researches of the 

 survey were bent to meet it; and when provision was made 

 for continuing the work it was understood that the primary 

 duty of the new bureau should be the classification of the 

 Indian tribes for practical as well as for scientific purposes. 

 One of the effects of this requirement was to give a name to 

 the office, which thus came to be designated a bureau of eth- 

 nology ; another effect was to confine the early operations of 

 the bureau to the United States, though it was planned 

 by statesmen to extend operations over North America 

 at the outset and finally over the hemisphere, and the terms 

 of the law were fixed in accordance with this purpose. The 

 most profound and far-reaching effect of the plan was the 

 rapid development and early application of a mode of classi- 

 fication, which has guided the subsequent operations of the 

 bureau. In the infancy of anthropology the races of men 

 were classed by color of skin, character of hair, form of 

 cranium, attitude of eyes, and other corporeal or physical 

 features ; even before the creation of the bureau certain an- 

 thropologists, notably Gallatin in the second quarter of the 

 century, realized that, while the American aborigines may 



