ADVANCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 475 



for he showed the value of discussing man from a 

 natural history point of view, and shed the light of 

 the evolution-idea on a mass of anthropological facts 

 which had previously been little more than curi- 

 osities. 



Associated with these there is now another sad im- 

 pulse, that certain races are in process of rapid 

 elimination ; their scientific lesson must be read now 

 or never. An anthropological expedition is urgently 

 needed to study fleeting customs, as E. H. 31an and 

 M. V. Portman did for the natives of the Andaman 

 Islands, as Prof. A. C. Haddon did at the Torres 

 Straits, as Profs. Baldwin Spencer and Gillen have 

 been doing in Australia, as Government officials and 

 others are doing for the American aboriginal popula- 

 tion. 



Perhaps another impulse to careful anthropologi- 

 cal study has come from the insistent importance of 

 criminology. The great practical interest of this 

 enquiry has reacted on the science of anthropology 

 from which it had its origin. 



MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 



We use this time-honoured phrase to designate 

 the problem still far from solution of man's 

 genetic relationship to some pre-human or Simian 

 stock. Even Sir Richard Owen, conservative as he 

 was, recognised the " all-pervading similitude of 

 structure " between man and the apes, and since Dar- 

 win's Descent of Man and Huxley's essay on Mans 

 Place in Nature, it has seemed quite fair to reject 

 any interpretation which denies man's structural re- 

 semblance to some Simian or ape-like type. So far 

 as bodily structure is concerned, Man is plainly one 

 of the Primates. As regards the psychical charac- 



