616 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
was an effort to meet, against time, an emergency long predicted, but only suddenly 
foreseen by the men who were responsible for giving the order. Thus, humanly 
speaking, it is now not improbable that in one great newly-settled area of the 
world every tribe of natives, which now continues to inhabit it, may at least be 
explored, and in some cases really surveyed, before it has time to disappear. But 
observe, this only applies to the tribes which now continue to exist; and what a 
miserable fraction they are of what has already perished irrevocably! It is no 
use crying over spilt milk, as I said to begin with; the only sane course is to be 
doubly careful of whatever remains in the jug. 
An Ethnological Survey for Canada. 
And now I conclude with a piece of recent history, which will point its own 
moral. When the British Association met first outside the British Isles, it 
celebrated its meeting at Montreal by instituting, for the first time, a section for 
Anthropology ; and it placed in the chair of that section one of the principal 
founders of modern scientific anthropology, Dr. Edward Burnett Tylor, then 
recently installed at Oxford, and still the revered Professor of our science there. 
Through his influence mainly, but with the active goodwill of the leading names 
in other sciences in Canada, a research committee was formed to investigate the 
north-west tribes of the Dominion; and for eleven consecutive years expeditions 
wholly or partly maintained by this Association were sent to several districts of 
British Columbia. These expeditions cost the Association about £1,200 in all. 
I am glad to think that the chief representative of this Committee’s work, Dr. 
Franz Boas, has long since realised, in his great contributions to knowledge, the 
high hopes which his early reports inspired. 
‘When the Association met the second time on Canadian soil, at Toronto, the 
occasion seemed opportune for a fresh step. Dr. Boas had already undertaken 
work on a larger scale and under other auspices. But it was thought likely that 
if a fresh Committee of the Association were appointed, with wider terms of 
reference and further grants, it would be possible to select and to train a small 
staff of Canadian observers, and by their means to produce such a series of 
preliminary reports on typical problems of Canadian anthropology as would satisfy 
the Dominion Government that the need for a thorough systematic survey was 
a real one, and that such a survey would be practicable with the means and the 
men which Canada itself could supply. Among the leading members of this 
Ethnographic Survey Committee I need only mention three—the late Dr. George 
Dawson, Mr. David Boyle, and Mr. Benjamin Sulte, each eminent already in his 
own line of study, and all convinced of the great scientific value of what was 
proposed. The first year’s enterprise opened well ; workers were found in several 
’ districts of Canada; the Association sent out scientific instruments, and formed 
in London a strong consultative committee to keep the Canadian field-workers 
in touch with European students of the subject. But the premature death of 
George Dawson in 1901 broke the mainspring of the machine; the field-workers 
fell out of touch with one another and with the subject ; the instruments were 
scattered, and in 1904 the Ethnographic Survey Committee was not recommended 
for renewal. 
I need not say how great a disappointment this failure has been to those of us 
who believe that in this department of knowledge Canada has great contributions 
to make, and who know—as this Meeting too knows perfectly well—that if this 
contribution to knowledge is not made within the next ten years, it can never be 
made at all. I am not speaking merely of the urgency of exact study of the 
Indian peoples. This indeed is obvious and urgent enough; and the magnifi- 
cent results of organised effort in the United States are there to show how much 
you too can still rescue, if you will. But at the moment I appeal rather 
for the systematic study of your own European immigrants, that stream of 
almost all known varieties of white men with which you are drenching yearly 
fresh regions of the earth’s surface, which if they have had experience of human 
settlements at all, have known man only as a predatory migratory animal, 
more restless than the bison, more feckless and destructive than the wolf. 
Of your immigrants’ dealings with wild nature you are indeed keeping rough, 
