xvi IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY OF RACE 237 



our dependencies and colonies are due, especially the great 

 inconsistency between a favourite English theory and a too 

 common English practice the former being that all men are 

 morally and intellectually alike, the latter being that all are 

 equally inferior to himself in all respects : both propositions 

 egregiously fallacious. The study of race is at a low ebb 

 indeed when we hear the same contemptuous epithet of 

 " nigger " applied indiscriminately by the Englishmen abroad 

 to the blacks of the West Coast of Africa, the Kaffirs of Natal, 

 the Lascars of Bombay, the Hindoos of Calcutta, the aborigines 

 of Australia, and even the Maoris of New Zealand ! 



But how is he to know better ? Where in this country is 

 any instruction to be had ? WTiere are the books to which he 

 may turn for trustworthy information ? The subject, as I have 

 said, is but slightly touched upon in the last published treatise 

 on anthropology in our language. The great work of Pritchard, 

 a compendium of all that was known at the time it was written, 

 is now almost entirely out of date. In not a single university 

 or public institution throughout the three kingdoms is there 

 any kind of systematic teaching, either of physical or of any 

 other branch of anthropology, except so far as comparative 

 philology may be considered as bearing upon the subject. 

 The one Society of which it is the special business to promote 

 the study of these questions, the Anthropological Institute 

 of Great Britain and Ireland, is, I regret to say, far from 

 nourishing. An anthropological museum, in the proper sense 

 of the word, either public or private, does not exist in this 

 country. 



What a contrast is this to what we see in almost every 

 other nation in Europe ! At Paris there is, first, the Museum 

 d'Histoire Naturelle, where man, as a zoological subject 

 almost entirely neglected in our British Museum has a 

 magnificent gallery allotted to him, abounding not only in 

 illustrations of osteology, but also in models, casts, drawings, 

 and anatomical preparations, showing various points in his 

 physical or natural history, which are expounded to the public 

 in the free lectures of the venerable Professor Quatrefages and 

 his able coadjutor, Dr. Hamy. There is also the vigorous Society 

 of Anthropology, which is stated in the last annual report to 



