H. — ANTHROPOLOGY. 148 



We are far indeed from that to-day ; but it befits us none the less 

 to study what this new anthropological movement in Germany connotes. 

 It means that the material of anthropology is going to change, or rather 

 that its observations will be extended into a study of the mental as 

 well as the physical characters, and these of the white races as well as of 

 the dark. It means that anthropologists will not only study individual 

 psychology, but folk-psychology. It means — and this is directly said — - 

 that Germany, having lost her colonies, will still maintain her trade by 

 aid of consuls, missionaries, traders, travellers, and others trained 

 academically to understand both savage and civilised peoples. This is a 

 perfectly fair field, and if the game be played squarely can solely lead 

 to increased human sympathy, and we shall only have ourselves to 

 blaane if other nations are before us in their anthropological knowledge 

 and its practical applications. The first condition for State support 

 is that we show our science to be utile by turning to the problems 

 of racial efficiency, of race-psychology, and to all those tasks that 

 Galton described as the first duty of a nation — ' in short, to make 

 every individual efficient both through Nature and by Nurture.' 



Does this mean that we are to turn our backs on the past, to 

 desert all our prehistoric studies and to make anthropology the servant 

 of sanitation and commerce? Not in tlie least; if you think this is my 

 doctrine I have indeed failed to make myself even roughly clear to-day. 

 Such teaching is wholly opposed to my view of the function of science. 

 I feel quite convinced that you cannot understand man of to-day, savage 

 or civilised, his body or his mind, unless you know his past evolution, 

 unless you have studied fully all the scanty evidence we have of the 

 stages of his ascent. I should like to illustrate this by an incident 

 which came recently to my notice, because it may indicate to some 

 of those present the difficulties with which the anthropologist has to 

 contend to avoid misunderstanding. 



Looking into the ancestry of man and tracing him backward to a 

 being who was not man and was not ape, had this prot-simio-human, 

 in the light of our present knowledge, more resemblance to the gibbon 

 or to the chimpanzee as we know them to-day? Some naturalists 

 link man up to the apes by a gibbonlike form, others by a troglodyte 

 type of ancestor. Some would make a push to do without either. But 

 granted the alternative, which is the more probable? This is the 

 problem of the hylobatic or the troglodyte origin of man. I had given 

 a lecture on the subject, confining my arguments solely to characters 

 of the thigh-bone. Now there chanced to be a statesman present, a 

 man who has had large responsibilities in the government of many races. 

 I have been honoured by seeing his comments on my lecture. ' I am 

 not,' he says, 'particularly interested in the descent of man. I do 

 not believe much in heredity, and this scientific pursuit of the dead 

 bones of the past does not seem to me a vtery useful way of spending 

 life. I am accustomed to this mode of study ; learned volumes Have 

 been written in Sanscrit to explain the conjunction of the two vowels 

 " a" and " u." It is very learned, very ingenious, but not very help- 

 ful. ... I am not concerned with my genealogy so much as with my 

 future. Our intellects can be more advantageously employed than in 



