OcToBER 16, 1913] 
NATURE 213 
I have always advocated personal inquiry into the 
native currency and money, even of pre-British days, 
of the people amongst whom a Britisher’s lot is cast, 
for the reason that the study of the mental processes 
that lead up to commercial relations, internal and 
external, the customs concerned with daily buying 
and selling, take one more deeply into aliens’ habits 
of mind and their outlook on practical life than any 
other branch of research. The student will find him- 
self involuntarily acquiring a knowledge of the whole 
_ life of a people, even of superstitions and local politics, 
matters that commercial men, as well as adminis- 
trators, cannot, if they only knew it, ever afford to 
ignore. The study has also a great intellectual in- 
terest, and neither the man of commerce nor the man 
of affairs should disregard this side of it if he would 
attain success in every sense of that term. 
Just let me give one instance from personal experi- 
ence. A few years back a number of ingots of tin, 
in the form of birds and animals and imitations 
thereof, hollow tokens of tin ingots, together with a 
number of rough notes taken on the spot, were 
handed over to me for investigation and report. They 
came from the Federated Malay States, and were 
variously said to have been used as toys and as money 
in some form. A long and careful investigation un- 
earthed the whole story. They turned out to be sur- 
viving specimens of an obsolete and forgotten Malay 
currency. Bit by bit, by researches into travellers’ 
stories and old records, European and vernacular, it 
was ascertained that some of the specimens were cur- 
rency and some money, and that they belonged to two 
separate series. Their relations to each other were 
ascertained, and also to the currencies of the European 
and Oriental nations with whom the Malays of the 
Peninsula had come in contact. The mint profit in 
some instances, and in other instances the actual 
profit European Governments and mercantile authori- 
ties, and even native traders, had made in recorded 
transactions of the past, was found out. The origin 
of the British, Dutch, and Portuguese money, evolved 
for trading with the Malays, was disclosed, and 
several interesting historical discoveries were made; 
as, for instance, the explanation of the coins still 
remaining in museums and issued in 1510 by the 
great Portuguese conqueror, Albuquerque, for the then 
new Malay possessions of his country, and the mean- 
ing of the numismatic plates of the great French 
traveller Tavernier in the next century. Perhaps the 
most interesting, and anthropologically the most im- 
portant, discovery was the relation of the ideas that 
led up to the animal currency of the Malays to similar 
ideas in India, Central Asia, China, and Europe itself 
throughout all historical times. One wonders how 
many people in these isles grasp the fact that our 
_ own monetary scale of 960 farthings to the sovereign, 
_ and the native Malay scale of 1,280 cash to the dollar, 
are representatives of one and the same universal 
scale, with more than probably one and the same 
origin out of a simple method of counting seeds, peas, 
beans, shells, or other small natural constant weights, 
But the point for the present purpose is that not only 
will the student find that long practice in anthropo- 
logical inquiry, and the learning resulting therefrom, 
will enable him to make similar discoveries, but also 
that the process of discovery is intensely interesting. 
Such discoveries, too, are of practical value. In this 
_ instance they have taught us much of native habits 
_ of thought and views of life in newly acquired posses- 
; sions which no administrator there, mercantile or 
r governmental, can set aside with safety. 
§ 
] 
I must not dwell too long on this aspect of my 
subject, and will only add the following remark. If 
any of my hearers will go to the Pitt-Rivers Museum 
at Oxford he will find many small collections record- 
NO. 2294, VOL. 92] 
ing the historical evolution of various common objects. 
Among them is a series showing the history of the 
tobacco pipe, commonly known to literary students 
in this country as the nargileh and to Orientalists as 
the hukka. At one end of the series will be found a 
hollow coconut with an artificial hole in it, and then 
every step in evolution between that and an elaborate 
hukka with its long, flexible, drawing-tube at the 
other end. I give this instance as I contributed the 
series, and I well remember the eagerness of the hunt 
in the Indian bazaars and the satisfaction on proving 
every step in the evolution. 
There is one aspect of life where the anthropological 
instinct would be more than useful, but to which, 
alas, it cannot be extended in practice. Politics, 
government, and administration are so interdependent 
throughout the world that it has always seemed to 
me to be a pity that the value to himself of following 
the principles of anthropology cannot be impressed on 
the average politician of any nationality. I fear it is 
hopeless to expect it. Were it only possible the extent 
of the consequent benefit to mankind is at present 
beyond human forecast, as then the politician could 
approach his work without that arrogance of ignor- 
ance of his fellow-countrymen on all points except 
their credulity that is the bane of the ordinary types 
of his kind wherever found, with which they have 
always poisoned and are still poisoning their minds, 
mistaking the satisfaction of the immediate tem- 
porary interests and prejudices of themselves and 
comrades for the permanent advantage of the whole 
people, whom, in consequence, they incontinently mis- 
govern whenever and for so long as their country is 
so_undiscerning as to place them in power. 
Permit me, in conclusion, to enforce the main argu- 
ment of this address by a personal note. It was my 
fortune to have been partly trained in youth at a 
university college, where the tendency was to produce 
men of affairs rather than men of the schools, and 
only the other day it was my privilege to hear the 
present master of the college, my own contemporary 
and fellow-undergraduate, expound the system of 
training still carried out there. ‘‘In the government 
of young men,’’ he said, ‘intellect is all very well, 
but sympathy counts for very much more.’ Here we 
have the root principle of applied anthropology. Here 
we have in a nutshell the full import of its teaching. 
The sound administration of the affairs of men can 
only be based on cultured sympathy, that sympathy 
on sure knowledge, that knowledge on competent 
study, that study on accurate inquiry, that inquiry on 
right method, and that method on continuous experi- 
ence. 
SECTION I. 
PHYSIOLOGY, 
OPENING Appress By F. Gowranp Hopkins, F.R.S., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
The Dynamic Side of Biochemistry. 
In the year 1837 Justus Liebig, whom we may 
rightly name the father of modern animal chemistry, 
presented a report to the Chemical Section of the 
British Association, then assembled at Liverpool. The 
technical side of this report dealt with the products 
of the decomposition of uric acid, with which I am 
not at the moment concerned, but it concluded with 
remarks which, to judge from other contemporary 
writings of Liebig, would have been more emphatic 
had the nature of his brief communication permitted. 
Liebig had a profound belief that in the then new 
science of organic chemistry, biology was to find its 
greatest aid to progress, and his enthusiastic mind 
was fretted by the cooler attitude of others. In the 
