12 McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING 



his friends were ever ready to amass new material for induction, but 

 their own minds set a definite stamp on the data, thus fitting them 

 into a preconceived scheme. The importance given to deductive 

 thought was also the reason why so many among this group of men 

 were ready to attack scientific problems of the most divine kind, and 

 why the craft of the expert was held in less respect by them than the 

 open eye of a clearminded observer. With Powell the systematic 

 idea had taken such firm root that he had planned a complete syste- 

 matic description of American anthropology in a few volumes, which 

 would have been an epitome of his philosophy. He even hesitated 

 to make the full data on which this epitome was to be based common 

 property of the scientific world. Although the work of some of his 

 collaborators, like Dorsey and Gatschet, did not at all fit into this 

 scheme, it was the ideal for which he was striving. Me Gee broke 

 away from this concept, in so far as he recognized more clearly the 

 necessity of detailed monographic studies of data, and of promoting 

 new lines of research that might not fit into the system. Neverthe- 

 less his own inquiries were largely directed by his philosophic inter- 

 est in principles, and the most characteristic feature of his own re- 

 searches is the relatively slight basis of, observation for far-reaching 



deduction. *"* r 



At the same time the thorough saturation of his mind with the 

 principles upon which his scientific facts were to bear made him an 

 acute observer, and gave to his field-work an unusual value. He 

 never became a gatherer of disconnected facts, but every observa- 

 tion had an immediate bearing upon some of the fundamental prob- 

 lems of anthropology as they appeared to his mind. I may mention 

 particularly his studies of desert environment, which bring out this 

 characteristic trait of his work most clearly. His short visit to the 

 Seri Indians of the Gulf of California gave him the material for an 

 elaborate treatise, which is remarkable on account of the ingenious 

 interpretation of data, observed with great skill and care, but never- 

 theless fragmentary, an interpretation that can be understood only 

 when we take into account the deductive basis on which he mar- 

 shalled his array of facts. No less marked is this tendency in his 

 investigations on primitive systems of numeration, on primitive tre- 

 phining in Peru, and on the origin of agriculture. He never lost 



