210 
NATURE 
[OcToBER 16, 1913 
million square miles of territory in thirteen provinces, 
in northern Africa. These two areas occupy, as it 
were, a position between the self-governing and the 
directly-governed areas. Of these, there are in Europe 
Malta and Gibraltar, Cyprus being officially included 
in Asia.: In Asia itself is the mighty Indian Empire, 
which includes Aden and the Arabian coast on the 
west and Burma on the east, and many islands in the 
intervening seas, with its fifteen provinces and some 
twenty categories of native states “in subordinate 
alliance,” that is, under general Imperial control. To 
these are added Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and 
the Malay States, federated or other, North Borneo 
and Sarawak, and in the China Seas Hong Kong 
and Wei-hai-wei. In South Africa we find Basuto- 
land, Bechuanaland, and Rhodesia; in British West 
Africa, Gambia, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and 
Nigeria; in eastern and Central Africa, Somaliland, 
the East Africa Protectorate, Uganda, Zanzibar, and 
Nyassaland; while attached to Africa are the Mauri- 
tius, Seychelles, Ascension, and St. Helena. In Cen- 
tral and South America are Honduras and British 
Guiana, and attached to that continent the Falkland 
Islands, and also Bermuda and the six colonies of 
British West Indies. In the Pacific Ocean are Fiji, 
Papua, and many of the Pacific Islands. 
I am afraid that once more during the course of this 
exposition I have been obliged to resort to a concen- 
tration of statement that is almost bewildering. But 
let that be. If one is to grapple successfully with a 
large and complex subject, it is necessary to try and 
keep before the mind, so far as possible, not only its 
magnitude, but the extent of its complexity. This is 
the reason for bringing before you, however briefly 
and generally, the main geographical details of the 
British Empire. The first point to realise on such a 
survey is that the mere extent of such an Empire 
makes the subject of its administration an immensely 
important one for the British people. 
The next point for consideration and realisation is 
that an empire, situated in so many widely separated 
parts of the world, must contain within its boundaries 
groups of every variety of mankind, in such numerical 
strength as to render it necessary to control them as 
individual entities. They do not consist of small 
bodies lost in a general population, and therefore 
negligible from the administrator’s point of view, but 
of whole races and tribes or of large detachments 
thereof. 
These tribes of mankind profess every variety of 
religion known. They are Christians, Jews, Mahom- 
medans, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Animists, and, to 
use a very modern expression, Animatists, adherents 
of main religions followed by an immense variety of 
sects, governed, however loosely, by every species of 
philosophy that is ‘or has been in fashion among 
groups of mankind, and current in every stage of 
development, from the simplest and most primitive to 
the most historical and complex. One has to bear in 
mind that we have within our borders the 
Andamanese, the Papuan, and the Polynesian, as well 
as the highly civilised Hindu and Chinese, and that 
not one of these, nor indeed of many other peoples, 
has any tradition of philosophy or religion in common 
with our own; their very instincts of faith and belief 
following other lines than ours, the prejudices with 
which their minds are saturated being altogether alien 
to those with which we ourselves are deeply imbued. 
The subjects of the British King-Emperor speak 
between them most of the languages of the world, 
and certainly every structural variety of human speech 
has its example somewhere in the British Empire. A 
number of these languages is still only in the process 
of becoming understood by our officials and other 
residents among their speakers, and let there be no 
NO. 2294, VOL. 92] 
mistake as to the magnitude of the -question involved — 
in the point of language alone in British Imperial 
regions. A man may be what is called a linguist. 
He may have a working knowledge of the main 
European languages and of the great Oriental tongues — 
—Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani—which will carry 
him very far indeed among the people—in a sense, 
in fact, from London to Calcutta—and then, without 
leaving that compact portion of the British possessions 
known as the Indian Empire, with all its immense 
variety of often incompatible subordinate languages 
and dialects, he has only to step across the border 
into Burma and the Further East to find himself in a 
totally different atmosphere of speech, where not one 
of the sounds, not one of the forms, not one of the 
methods, with which he has become familiarised is of 
any service to him whatever. The same observation 
will again be forced on him if he transfers himself 
thence to southern Africa or to the Pacific Ocean. 
Let him wander amongst the North American Indians 
and he will find the linguistic climate once more 
altogether changed. 
Greater Britain may be said to exhibit all the many 
varieties of internal social relations that have been 
set up by tribes and groups of mankind—all the 
different forms of family and general social organisa- 
tion, of reckoning kinship, of inheritance and control 
of the possession of property, of dealing with the 
birth of children and their education and training, 
physical, mental, moral, and professional, in many 
cases by methods entirely foreign to British ideas and 
habits. For instance, infanticide as a custom has 
many different sources of origin. 
Our fellow-subjects of the King follow, somewhere 
or other, all the different notions and habits that have 
been formed by mankind as to the relations between 
the sexes, both permanent and temporary, as to mar- 
riage and to what have been aptly termed supple-— 
mentary unions. And finally, their methods of deal- 
ing with death and bringing it about, of disposing 
of the dead and worshipping them, give expression 
to ideas, which it requires study for an inhabitant of — 
Great Britain to appreciate or understand. I may 
quote here, as an example, that of all the forms of 
human head-hunting and other ceremonial murder 
that have come within my cognisance, either as an 
administrator or investigator, not one has originated 
in callousness or cruelty of character. Indeed, from 
the point of view of the perpetrators, they are in- 
variably resorted to for the temporal or spiritual 
benefit of themselves or their tribe. In making this 
remark, I must not be understood as proposing that 
they should not be put down, wherever that is prac- 
ticable. I am merely trying now to give an anthropo- 
logical explanation of human phenomena. 
In very many parts of the British Empire, the 
routine of daily life and the notions that govern it 
often find no counterparts of any kind in those of the 
British Isles, in such matters as personal habits and 
etiquette on occasions of social intercourse. And yet, 
perhaps, nothing estranges the administrator from 
his people more than mistakes on these points. It is 
small matters—such as the mode of salutation, forms 
of address and politaness, as rules of precedence, 
hospitality, and decency, as recognition of super- 
stitions, however apparently unreasonable—which 
largely govern social relations, which no stranger can 
afford to ignore, and which at the same time cannot 
be ae cained and observed correctly without due 
study. 
The considerations so far urged to-day have carried 
us through the points of the nature and scope of the 
science of anthropology, the mental equipment neces- 
sary for the useful pursuit of it, the methods by which 
it can be successfully studied, the extent and nature 
