a. — ANTHROtOLOOV* l39 



hopeless to believe that anthropometric measurements of the body or 

 records of pigmentation are going to help us to a science of the psycho- 

 physical characters of man which will be useful to the State. The 

 modern State needs in its citizens vigour of mind and vigour of body, 

 but these are not chaj-acters with which the anthropometry of the past 

 has largely busied itself. In a certain sense the school medical officer 

 and the medical officer of health are doing more State service of an 

 anthropological character than the anthropologists themselves. 



These doubts have come very forcibly to my notice during the last 

 few years. What were the anthropologists as anthropologists doing 

 during the war? Many of them were busy enough and doing valuable 

 work because they were anatomists, or because they were surgeons, 

 or perhaps even because they were mathematicians. But as anthropo- 

 logists, what was their position? The whole period of the war pro- 

 duced the most difficult pi'oblems in folk-psychology. There were 

 occasions innumerable when thousands of lives and most heavy expen- 

 diture of money might have been saved by a greater knowledge of 

 what creates and what damps folk-movements in the various races 

 of the world. India, Egypt, Ireland, even our present relations with 

 Italy and America, show only too painfully how difficult we find it to 

 appreciate the psychology of other nations. We shall not surmount 

 these difficulties until anthropologists take a wider view of the material 

 they have to record, and of the task they have before them if they 

 wish to be utile to the State. It is not the physical measurement of 

 native races which is a fundamental feature of anthropometry to-day ; 

 it is the psychometry and what I have termed the vigorimetry of white- 

 as well as of dark-skinned men that must become the main subjects 

 of our study. 



Some of you may consider that I am overlooking what has been 

 contributed both in this country and elsewhere to the science of folk- 

 psychology. I know at least that Wilhelm Wundt's ' great work runs 

 to ten volumes. But I also know that in its 5452 pages there is 

 not a single table of numerical measurements, not a single state- 

 ment of the qiiantitative association between mental racial characters, 

 nor, indeed, any attempt to show numerically the intensity of 

 association between folk-mentality and folk customs and institutions. 

 It is folk-psychology in the same stage of evolution as present-day 

 sociology is in, or as individual psychology was in before the advent 

 of experimental psychology and the correlational calculus. It is 

 purely descriptive and verbal. I am not denying that many sciences 

 must for a long period still remain in this condition, but at the same 

 time I confess myself a firm disciple of Friar Roger Bacon ^ and of 

 Leonardo da Vinci,* and believe that we can really know very little 



* Its last volume also bears evidence of the non-judicial mind of the writer, 

 who expresses strong opinions about recent events in the language of the party 

 historian rather than the man of science. 



* He who knows not Mathematics cannot know any other science, and what 

 is more cannot discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedies. 



* Nissuna humana investigatione si po dimandare vera scientia s'essa non 

 passa per le mathematiche dimostratione. 



