TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H.—PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 589 
Section H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEcTION.—Professor JoHN lL. Myres, M.A., F.S.A. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 26. 
The President delivered the following Address : — 
The Influence of Anthropology on the Course of Political Science. 
ANTHROPOLOGY is the Science of Man. Its full task is nothing less than this, 
to observe and record, to classify and interpret, all the activities of all the varieties 
of this species of living being. In the general scheme of knowledge, therefore, 
anthropology holds a double place, according to our own point of view. From 
one standpoint it falls into the position of a department of zoology, or geography ; 
of zoology, since man, considered as a natural species, forms only one small part 
of the animal population of this planet; of geography, because his reason, con- 
sidered simply as one of the forces which change the face of nature, has, as we shall 
see directly, a range which is almost worldwide. From another point of view 
anthropology itself, in the strictest sense of the word, is seen to embrace and 
include whole sciences such as psychology, sociology, and the rational study of 
art and literature ; since each of these vast departments of knowledge is con- 
cerned solely with a single group of the manifold activities of man. In practice, 
however, a pardonable pride, no less than the weighty fact that man, alone 
among the animals, truly possesses reason, has kept the study of man a little 
aloof from the rest of zoology. Dogmatic scruples have intervened to prevent 
man from ever ranking merely as one of the ‘ forces of nature,’ and have set a 
hard problem of delimitation between historians and geographers. And the 
natural modesty of a very young science—for modern anthropology is barely 
as old as chemistry—has restrained it from insisting on encyclopedic claims in 
face of reverend institutions like the sciences of the mind, of statecraft, and of 
taste. 
Yet when I say that anthropology is a young science I mean no more than 
this, that in the unfolding of that full bloom of rational culture, which sprang 
from the seeds of the Renaissance, and of which we are the heirs and trustees, 
anthropology found its place in the sunlight later than most ; and almost alone 
among the sciences can reckon any of its founders among the living. This was 
of course partly an accident of birth and circumstance ; for in the House of 
Wisdom there are many mansions ; a Virchow, a Bastian, or a Tylor might easily 
have strayed through the gate of knowledge into other fields of work ; just as 
Locke and Montesquieu only narrowly missed the trail into anthropology. 
But this late adolescence was also mainly the result of causes which we can 
now see clearly. Man is, most nearly of all living species, the ‘ ubiquitous 
animal.’ Anthropology, like meteorology, and like geography itself, gathers its 
date from all longitudes, and almost all latitudes, on this earth. It was necessary, 
