360 



NATURE 



[September 14, 191 1 



peoples or of the most profound political changes, the 

 obvious inference is that it is with social structure that we 

 must begin the attempt to analyse culture and to ascertain 

 how far community of culture is due to the blending of 

 peoples, how far to transmission through mere contact or 

 transient settlement. 



The considerations I have brought forward have, how- 

 ever, in my opinion, an importance still more fundamental. 

 If social institutions have this relatively great degree of 

 permanence, if they are so deeply seated and so closely 

 interwoven with the deepest instincts and sentiments of a 

 people that they can only gradually suffer change, will 

 not the study of this change give us our surest criterion of 

 what is early and what is late in any given culture, and 

 thereby furnish a guide for the analysis of culture? Such 

 criteria of early and late are necessary if we are to arrange 

 the cultural elements reached by our analysis in order of 

 time, and it is very doubtful whether mere geographical 

 distribution itself will ever furnish a sufficient basis for 

 this purpose. I may remind you here that before the 

 importance of the complexity of Melanesian culture had 

 forced itself on my mind, I had already succeeded in 

 tracing out a course for the development of the structure 

 of Melanesian society, and after the complexity of the 

 culture had been established, I did not find it necessary 

 to alter anything of essential importance in this scheme. 

 I suggest, therefore, that while the ethnological analysis 

 of cultures must furnish a necessary preliminary to any 

 general evolutionary speculations, there is one element of 

 culture which has so relatively high a degree of perman- 

 ence that its course of development may furnish a guide 

 to the order in time of the different elements into which 

 it is possible to analyse a given complex. 



If the development of social structure is thus to be 

 taken as a guide to assist the process of analysis, it is 

 evident that there will be involved a logical process of 

 considerable complexity in which there will be the danger 

 of arguing in a circle. If, however, the analysis of culture 

 is to be the primary task of the anthropologist, it is 

 evident that the logical methods of the science will attain 

 a complexity far exceeding those hitherto in vogue. I 

 believe that the only logical process which will in general 

 be found possible will be the formulation of hypothetical 

 working schemes into which the facts can be fitted, and 

 that the test of such schemes will be their capacity to fit 

 in with themselves, or, as we generally express it, 

 " explain " new facts as they come to our knowledge. 

 This is the method of other sciences which deal with 

 conditions as complex as those of human society. In 

 many other sciences these new facts are discovered by 

 experiment. In our science they must be found by explora- 

 tion, not only of the cultures still existent in living form, 

 but also of the buried cultures of past ages. 



And here is the hopeful aspect of our subject. I believe 

 our present store of facts, at any rate on the less material 

 sides of culture, to form but a very small part of that 

 which is yet to be obtained, and will be obtained, unless 

 we very wilfully neglect our opportunities. Waiting to be 

 collected there is a vast body of knowledge by means of 

 which to test the truth of schemes of the history of man- 

 kind, not only of his migrations and settlements, but of 

 the institutions and objects which have arisen at different 

 stages of his history and developed into various forms 

 throughout the world. 



And this brings me to my concluding topic. I have 

 tried to show that any speculations concerning the history 

 of human institutions can only have a sound basis if 

 cultures have first been analysed into their component 

 elements, but I do not wish for one moment to depreciate 

 the importance of attempts to seek for the origin and early 

 history of human institutions. To me the analysis of 

 culture is merely the means to an end, which would have 

 little interest if it did not show us the way to the proper 

 understanding of the history of human institutions. The 

 importance of the facts of ethnology in the study of 

 civilised culture is now generally recognised. You can 

 hardly take up a modern work dealing with any aspect 

 of human thought and activity without finding reference 

 to the customs and institutions of savage or barbarous 

 peoples. It is becoming recognised that a study of these 

 helps us to understand much that is obscure in our own 



NO. 2185, VOL. 87] 



institutions or in those of other great civilisations of the 

 present or the past. Further, there can be no doubt that 

 we are only at the threshold of a new movement in learn- 

 ing which is being opened by this comparative study. 



It is a cruel irony that just as the importance of the 

 facts and conclusions of ethnological research is thus be- 

 coming recognised, and just as we are beginning to learn 

 sound principles and methods for use both in the field and 

 in the study, the material of our science is vanishing. Not 

 only is the march of our own civilisation into the hitherto 

 undisturbed places of the earth more rapid than it has 

 ever been before, but this advance has made more easy 

 the spread of other destroying agencies. In many parts 

 of such a region as Melanesia, it is even now only from 

 the old men that any trustworthy information can be 

 obtained, and it is no exaggeration to say that with the 

 death of every old man there and in many other places 

 there goes, and goes for ever, knowledge the loss of 

 which the scholars of the future will regret as the 

 scholars of the past regretted such an event as the dis- 

 appearance of the library of Alexandria. There is no 

 other science in the same position. The nervous 

 system of an animal, the metabolism of a plant, 

 the condition of the South Pole, for instance, will a 

 hundred, or even a thousand, years hence be essentially 

 what they are to-day, but long before the shorter of those 

 times has passed, most, if not all, of the lower cultures 

 now found on different parts of the earth will have wholly 

 disappeared or have suffered such change that little will be 

 learnt from them. Fortunately, the need for ethnographical 

 research is now forcing itself on the attention of those 

 who have to deal with savage or barbarous peoples. 

 Statesmen have begun to recognise the practical import- 

 ance of knowledge of the institutions of those they have to 

 govern, and missionary societies are beginning to see, what 

 every wise missionary has long known, that it is necessary 

 to understand the ideas and customs of those whose lives 

 they are trying to reform. Still, we must not be content 

 with these more or less official movements. There is 

 ample scope, indeed urgent need, for individual effort and 

 for non-official enterprise. It is not all who can go into 

 the field and do the needed work themselves, but there are 

 none who cannot in some way help to promote ethno- 

 graphical research. We have before us one of those critical 

 occasions which must be seized at once if they are to be 

 seized at all : the occasion of a need which to future 

 generations will seem to have been so obvious that its 

 neglect will be held an enduring reproach to the science 

 of our time. 



SECTION I. 



PHYSIOLOGY. 



Opening Address by Prof. J. S. Macdonald, B.A., 

 President of the Section. 



The special difficulties of physiology are well known to 

 a large section of my audience, but it may be permissible 

 to illustrate them by reference to an individual case. Take 

 for example those small capsules which are found in the 

 kidneys at the very summit, so to speak, of the problem of 

 renal secretion. These small bodies each occupy a space 

 of less than two thousandths of a cubic millimetre. Within 

 their interior they contain several different kinds of blood- 

 vessels that represent the structures of greatest mechanical 

 interest when dealing with the circulatory system, omitting, 

 of course, the heart. This almost complete sample of the 

 circulatory mechanism, itself formed of a congeries of 

 parts and unitary mechanisms, is enclosed by two or three 

 thousand cells of specific glandular function. Every one of 

 these cells again is a complex of mechanisms about which 

 we cannot rightly think until we reduce our conceptions to 

 the level of molecular dimensions. Enclosed then in (his 

 minute sp.->,-<\ within a mass that weighs two thousandths 

 of a milligramme, lie quite a series of the problems in 

 which physiology is interested. 



The difficulties occasioned by this minuteness of parts, 

 and by the manner in which they are complexly mixed 

 together, render direct investigation of single problems 

 possible only in the very simplest cases, as, for instance, 

 the red blood corpuscle and the nerve-fibre. 



A consideration of the dynamic properties of the red 



