888 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



If, however, the Department can find time to listen to me a second 

 time, I shall be glad to read a short pa])er myself upon this very 

 subject, mainly in the hope of getting Mr. Freeman to speak upon 

 it also. 



I come now (perhaps I should have come before) to the consider- 

 ation of the subject of craniology and craniography. Of the value 

 of the entirety of the physical history of a race there is no ques- 

 tion; but two very widely opposed views exist as to the value 

 of skull-measuring to the ethnographer. According to the views of 

 one school, craniography and ethnography are all but convertible 

 terms ; another set of teachers insist upon the great width of the 

 limits within which normal human crania from one and the same 

 race may oscillate, and upon the small value which, under such 

 circumstances, we can attach to differences expressed in tenths 

 of inches or even of centimetres. As usual, the truth will not be 

 found to lie in either extreme view. For the proper performance 

 of a craniographic estimation, two very different processes are neces- 

 sary : one is the carrying out and recording a number of measure- 

 ments; the other is the artistic appreciation of the general 

 impressions as to contour and type which the survey of a series 

 of skulls produces upon one. I have often thought that the work of 

 conducting an examination for a scholarship or fellowship is very 

 similarly dependent, when it is properly carried out, upon the 

 employment of two methods — one being the system of marking, 

 the other that of getting a general impression as to the power 

 of the several candidates ; and I would wish to be understood to 

 mean by this illustration not only that the two lines of inquiry are 

 both dependent upon the combination and counterchecking of two 

 different methods, but also that their results, like the results of some 

 other human investigations, must not be always, even though they 

 may be sometimes, considered to be free from all and any need for 

 qualification. Persons like M. Broca and Professor Aeby, who 

 have carried out the most extensive series of measurements, are 

 not the persons who express themselves in the strongest language 

 as to craniography being the universal solvent in ethnography or 

 anthropology. Aeby, for example, in his ' Schadelformen der 

 Menschen und der Affen,' 1867, p. 61, says: — 'Aus dem gesagten 

 geht hervor, dass die Stellung der Anthropologic gegeniiber den 

 Schadelformen eine ausserordentlich schwierige ist;' and the per- 



