180 
NATURE 
[NovEMBER 2, 1916. 
prove of the slightest avail, whether attempted within 
our universities or outside them. Anthropology must 
be studied in a scientific spirit—that is, for its own 
sake—and then the practical results will follow in due 
course. Light first, fruit afterwards, as Bacon says. 
So it has always been, and must always be, as regards 
the association of science with the arts of life. That 
Sir Richard Temple will heartily subscribe to such a 
principle I have no doubt at all. 
however, whose long and wide experience of adminis- 
tration and of the problems of empire had convinced 
him of the utility of the anthropological habit of mind 
to the official who has to deal with ‘“‘all sorts and 
conditions of men,” he naturally insisted on the value 
of anthropology in its applied character. On the other 
hand, it is equally natural that one whose career. has 
been wholly academic should lay emphasis on the 
other side of the educational question, maintaining as 
an eminently practical proposition—for what can be 
more practical than to educate the nation on sound 
lines?—the necessity of establishing anthropology 
among the leading studies of our universities. 
How, then, is this end to be attained? The all- 
important condition of success, in my belief, is that 
all branches of anthropological study and research 
should be concentrated within a single school. For it 
is conceivable that a university may seek to satisfy its 
conscience in regard to the teaching of anthropology 
by trusting to the scattered efforts of a number of 
faculties and institutions, each of which is designed 
in the first instance to fulfil some other purpose Thus 
tor physical anthropology a would-be student must 
resort to the medical school, for social anthropology 
to the faculty of arts, for linguistics to the department 
of philology, for prehistorics to the archaeological 
museum, and soon. Such.a policy, to my mind, is a 
downright insult to our science. Is the anthropologist 
no better than a tramp that he should be expected to 
hang about academic back-doors in search of broken 
victuals? Fed on a farrago of heterogeneous by- 
products, how can the student ever be taught to en- 
visage his subject as a whole? How, for instance, 
is he ever to acquire the comprehensive outlook of the 
competent field-worker? Such a makeshift arrange- 
ment can at the most but produce certain specialists 
of the narrower sort. In ‘‘The Hunting of the 
Snark” they engaged a baker who could only bake 
bride-cake. | Anthropological expeditions have, per- 
haps, been entrusted before now to experts of this 
type; but they have not proved an entire success. I 
am not ashamed to deciare that the anthropologist, be 
he field-worker or study-worker—and, ideally, he 
should be both in one—must be something of a Jack- 
of-all-trades. This statement, of course, needs qualifi- 
cation, inasmuch as I would have him know every- 
thing about something, as well as something about 
everything. But the pure specialist, however useful 
he may be to society in his own way, is not as a 
rule a man of wide sympathies; whereas the student 
of mankind in the concrete must bring to his task, 
before all else, an intelligence steeped in sympathy 
and imagination. His soul, in fact, must be as many- 
sided as that complex soul-life of humanity which it is 
his ultimate business to understand. . .-. 
It has sometimes been objected that, however much 
we strive by means of organisation to invest anthro- 
As a man of affairs,’ 
pology with an external semblance of unity, the sub- . 
ject is essentially wanting in any sort of inner co- 
hesion. Nor does such criticism come merely from 
the ignorant outsider; for I remember how, when the 
programme for our diploma course at’ Oxford was 
first announced to the world, Father Schmidt found 
fault with it in the columns of Anthropos on the | 
ground that it was not the part of one and the same |! petent to teach in a broad and humanising way. 
man to combine the diverse special studies to which 
NO. 2453, VOL. 98] 
we had assigned a common anthropological bearing. m 
In the face of such strictures, however—and they were © 
likewise levelled at us from quarters nearer home— — 
we persisted in our design of training anthropologists — 
who should be what 1 may ‘eall ‘all-round men.” 
Let them, we thought, by all means devote themselves 
later on to whatever branch of the subject might 
attract them most; but let them in the first instance 
learn as students of human life to ‘‘see it steadily 
and see it. whole.” 
considerable number of students has passed throu 
our hands, and we are convinced that the composite 
curriculum provided in our diploma course works per- 
fectly in practice, and, in fact, well-nigh amounts to 
a liberal education in itself. It is true that it cuts 
across certain established lines of demarcation, such 
as, notably, the traditional frontier that divides the 
faculty of arts from the faculty of natural science. 
But what of that? Indeed, at the present moment, 
when the popular demand is for more science in educa- 
tion—and I am personally convinced that there is 
sound reason behind it—I am inclined to claim for 
our system of combined anthropological studies that 
it affords a crucial instance of the way in which 
natural science and the humanities, the interest in 
material things and the interest in the great civilising 
ideas, can be imparted conjointly, and with a due 
appreciation of their mutual relations. 
Now, there is tolerable agreement, to judge from 
the university syllabuses which I have been able to 
examine, as to the main constituents of a full course 
of anthropological studies. In the first place, physical 
anthropology must form part of such a training. I 
need not here go into the nature of the topics comprised 
under this head, the more so as I am no authority 
on this side of the subject. Suffice it to say that this 
kind of work involves the constant use of a well- 
equipped anatomical laboratory, with occasional excur- 
sions into the psychological laboratory which every 
university ought likewise to possess. It is notably 
this branch of anthropology which some would hand 
over entirely to the specialist, allowing him no part 
or lot in the complementary subjects of which I am 
about to speak: I can only say, with a due sense, I 
trust, of the want of expert knowledge on my 
part, that the results of the purely somato- 
logical study of man, at any rate apart from 
what has been done in the way of human palzon- 
tology, have so far proved rather disappointing; and I 
would ‘venture to suggest that the reason for this 
comparative sterility may lie not so much in the 
intrinsic difficulties of the subject as in a want of 
constructive imagination, such as must at once be 
stimulated by a fuller grasp of the possibilities of 
anthropological science as a whole. 
In the next place, cultural, as distinct from physical, 
anthropology must be represented in our ideal course 
by at least two distinct departments. The first of 
these, the department of prehistoric archeology and 
technology, involves the use of a museum capable of 
illustrating the material culture of mankind in all its 
rich variety. Here instruction will necessarily take 
the form of demonstration-lectures held in the presence 
of the objects themselves. To a limited extent it 
should even be possible to enable the student to acquire 
practical experience of the more elementary techno- 
logical processes, as, for instance, flint-knapping, fire- 
making, weaving, the manufacture of pottery, and so 
on. May I repeat that, to serve such educational pur- 
poses, a special kind of museum organisation is re- 
quired? Moreover, it will be necessary to include in the 
museum staff such persons as have had a comprehensive 
training in anthropology, and are consequently com- 
‘The other department of cultural anthropology is one 
Since this resolve was taken, a 
