SECTION H: CAEDIFP, 1920. 



ADDRESS 



TO THE 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL SECTION 



BY 



Pbof. KARL PEARSON, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., 



PRESIDENT OP THE SECTION. 



Anthropology — the Understanding of Man — should be, if Pierre 

 Charron were correct, the true science and the true study of mankind.^ 

 We might anticipate that in our days — in this era of science — anthro- 

 pology in its broadest sense would occupy the same exalted position 

 that theology occupied in the Middle Ages. We should hail it ' Queen 

 of the Sciences,' the crowning study of the academic curriculum. 

 Why is it that we are Section H and not Section A? If the answer 

 be given that such is the result of historic evolution, can we still be 

 satisfied with the position that anthropology at present takes up in our 

 British Universities and in our learned societies? Have our univer- 

 sities, one and all, anthropological institutes well filled with enthusi- 

 astic students, and are there brilliant professors and lecturers teaching 

 them not only to understand man's past, but to use that knowledge to 

 forward his future? Have we men trained during a long life of study 

 and research to represent our science in the arena, or do we largely 

 trust to dilettanti — to retired civil servants, to untrained travellers or 

 colonial medical men for our knowledge, and to the anatomist, the sur- 

 geon, or the archaeologist for our teaching? Needless to say, that for the 

 study of man we require the better part of many sciences, we must 

 draw for contributions on medicine, on zoology, on anatomy, on 

 archaeology, on folk-lore and travel-lore, nay, on history, psychology, 

 geology, and many other branches of knowledge. But a hotch- 

 potch of the facts of these sciences does not create anthropology. The 

 true anthropologist is not the man who has merely a wide knowledge 

 of the conclusions of other sciences, he is the man who grasps their 

 bearing on mankind and throws light on the past and present factors 

 of human evolution from that knowledge. 



1 "La vraye science et le vray estude de rhomme c'est rHomme." Pierre 

 Charron, De la Sagesse, Preface du Premier Livre, 1601. Pope, with his "The 

 proper study of mankind is Man," 1733, was, as we might anticipate, only a 

 plagiarist. 



