212 
zoology, paleontology, physiology, psychology, 
archeology, technology, socielogy, linguistics, and 
ethnology. There will also be courses in ethnology 
with special attention to field work for officials and 
missionaries, and it is interesting to note that students 
of Egyptology are already taking a course of lectures 
in ethnology and physical anthropology. 
Though the universities have thus been definite 
enough in their action where the authority is vested in 
them, it is needless to say that their representations 
to Governments have met with varying success, and 
so far they have not produced much practical result. 
But it is as well to note here that a precedent for the 
preliminary anthropological training of probationers 
in the Colonial Civil Service has been already set up, 
as the Government of the Sudan has directed that 
every candidate for its services shall go through a 
course of anthropology at Oxford or Cambridge. In 
addition to this, the Sudan Government has given a 
grant to enable a competent anthropologist from Lon- 
don to run a small scientific survey of the peoples 
under its administration. The Assam Government has 
arranged its ethnographical monographs on the lines 
of the British Association’s ‘‘Notes and Queries” 
with much benefit to itself, and it is believed that the 
Burma Government will do likewise. The Colonial 
Office has appointed a lecturer in anthropology for 
East and West Africa, and the Government of India 
is distributing copies of the anthropological articles 
in its Imperial Gazetteer to successful candidates for 
its civil services. 
Speaking in this place to such an audience as that 
before me, and encouraged by what has already been 
done elsewhere, I cannot think that I can be mistaken 
in venturing.to recommend the encouragement of the 
study of anthropology to the University of such a city 
as Birmingham, which has almost unlimited interests 
throughout the British Empire. For it should be re- 
membered that anthropological knowledge is as useful 
to merchants in partibus in dealing with aliens as to 
administrators so situated. Should this suggestion 
bear fruit, and should it be thought advisable some 
day to establish a school of anthropology in Birming- 
ham, I would also venture to point out that there are 
two requirements preliminary to the successful forma- 
tion of almost any school of study. These are a 
library and a museum ad hoc. At Oxford there is a 
well-known and _ well-conducted anthropological 
museum in the Pitt-Rivers collection, and the museum 
of archeology and ethnology at Cambridge contains 
collections of the greatest service to the anthropologist. 
Liverpool is also interesting itself in such matters. 
The Royal Anthropological Institute is forming a 
special library, and both that institute and the Univer- 
sity of London have the benefit of the splendid collec- 
tions of the British Museum and of the Horniman 
Museum readily accessible. The libraries at Oxford 
and Cambridge are, I need scarcely say, of world-wide 
fame. At all these places of learning, then, these 
requisites for this department of knowledge are forth- 
coming. 
It were almost superfluous to state why 
they are requisites. Every student requires, not 
only competent teachers to guide him in_ his 
particular branch of study, but also a_ library 
and a museum close at hand, where he can 
find the information he wants and the illustration 
of it. Where these exist, thither it will be found that 
students will flock. Birmingham possesses peculiar 
facilities for the formation of both, as the city has all 
over the Empire its commercial representatives, who 
can collect the required museum specimens on the 
spot. The financial labours also of those who distri- 
bute these men over Greater Britain, and indeed all 
over the world, produce the means to create the library | gains, the more clearly one sees the truth of this view. 
NO. 2294, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
4 
[OcToBER 16, 1913 EB 
and the school, and their universal interests provide 
the incentive for securing for those in their employ 
the best method of acquiring a knowledge of men that 
can be turned to useful commercial purpose. Beyond 
these suggestions I will not pursue this point now, 
except to express a hope that this discourse may lead 
to a discussion thereon before this meeting breaks up. 
Before I quit my subject I would like to be some-— 
what insistent on the fact that, though I have been 
dwelling so far exclusively on the business side, as 
it were, of the study of anthropology, it has a personal 
side as well. I would like to impress once more on — 
the student, as I have often had occasion to do already, 
that whether he is studying of his own free will or at 
the behest of circumstances, there is scarcely any 
better hobby in existence than this, or one that can _ 
be ridden with greater pleasure. It cannot, of course, — 
be mastered in a day. At first the lessons will be a 
grind. Then, until they are well learnt, they are 
irksome, but when fullness of knowledge and 
maturity of judgment are attained, there is, perhaps, 
no keener sense of satisfaction which human beings ~ 
can experience than that which is afforded by this 
study. Its range is so wide, its phases so very 
many, the interests involved in it so various, that it 
cannot fail to pleasantly occupy the leisure hours from 
youth to full manhood, and to be a solace, in some 
aspect or other, in advanced life and old age. 
The processes of discovery in the course of this 
study are of such interest in themselves that I should 
wish to give many instances, but I must confine 
myself now to one or two. The student will find on 
investigation, for instance, that however childish the 
reasoning of savages may appear to be on abstract 
subjects, and however silly some of their customs 
may seem, they are neither childish nor silly in reality. 
They are almost always the result of “correct argu- — 
ment from a false premiss’’—a mental process not — 
unknown to civilised races. The. student will also 
surely find that savages are not fools where their — 
concrete interests are concerned, as they conceive 
those interests to be. For example, in commerce, 
beads do not appeal to savages merely because they 
are pretty things, except for purposes of adornment. 
They will only part with articles they value for par- 
ticular sorts of beads which are to them money, in 
that they can procure in exchange for them, in their 
own country, something they much desire. They have 
no other reason for accepting any kind of bead in 
payment for goods. On few anthropological points 
can mistakes be made more readily than on this, and 
when they are made by merchants, financial disaster 
can well follow, so that what I have already said 
elsewhere as to this may bear repetition in part here. 
Savages in their bargains with civilised man never 
make one that does not, for reasons of their own, 
satisfy themselves. Each side, in such a case, views 
the bargain according to its own interest. On his 
side, the trader buys something of great value to him, 
when he has taken it elsewhere, with something of 
little value to him, which he has brought from else- 
where, and then, and only then, can he make what 
is to him a magnificent bargain. On the other-hand, 
the savage is more than satisfied, because with what 
he has got from the trader he can procure from 
among his own people something he very much 
covets, which the article he parted with could not have 
procured for him. Both sides profit by the bargain 
from their respective points of view, and traders 
cannot, as a matter of fact, take undue advantage of 
savages, who, as a body, part with products of little 
or no value to themselves for others of vital import- 
ance, though these last may be of little or none to the 
civilised trader. The more one dives into recorded bar- 
