H. — ^ANTHROPOLOGY. 147 



with the head and not the hand. One of the functions of the anthro- 

 pological laboratory of a great university, one of the functions of a 

 school anthropometric laboratory, should be to measure those physical 

 and mental characters and their inter-relations upon which a man's 

 success in a given career so much depends. Its function should be to 

 guide youth in the choice of a calling, and in the case of a school to 

 enable the headmaster to know something of the real nature of indi- 

 vidual boys, so that that much-tried man does not feel compelled to 

 hide his ignorance by cabalistic utterances when parents question him. 

 on what their son is fitted for. 



Wide, however, as is the anthropometric material in our universities 

 and public schools, it toucTies only a section of the population. The 

 modem anthropologist has to go further; he has to enter the doOrs of 

 the primary schools; he has to study the general population in all its 

 castes, its craftsmen, and its sedentary workers. Anthropology has to 

 be useful to commerce and to the State, not only in association with 

 foreign races, but still more in the selection of the right men and women 

 for the staff of factory, mine, office, and transport. The selection of 

 workmeri to-day by what is too often a rough trial and discharge method 

 is one of the wasteful factors of production. Few employers even ask 

 what trades parents and grandparents have followed, nor consider the 

 relation of a man's physique and mentality to his proposed employment. 

 I admit that progress in this direction will be slow, but if the work 

 undertaken in this sense by the anthropologist be well devised, accurate, 

 and comprehensive, the anthropometric laboratory will gradually obtain 

 an assured position in commercial appreciation. As a beginning, the 

 anthropologist by an attractive museum, by popular lectures and demon- 

 strations, should endeavour to create, as Sir Francis Galton did at 

 South Kensington, an anthropometric laboratory frequented by the 

 general population, as well as by the academic class. Thus he will 

 obtain a wider range of material. But the anthropologist, if he is to 

 advance his science and emphasise its services to the State, must pass 

 beyond the university, the school, and the factory. He must study 

 what makes for wastage in our present loosely organised society ; he 

 must investigate the material provided by reformatory, prison, asylums 

 for the insane and mentally defective; he must cari-y his researches into 

 the inebriate home, the sanatorium, and the hospital, side by side with 

 his medical collaborator. Here is endless work for the immediate 

 future, and work in which we are already leagues behind our American 

 colleagues. For them the psychometric and anthropometric laboratory 

 attached to asylum, prison, and reformatory is no startling innovation, 

 to be spoken of with bated breath. It is a recognised institution of the 

 United States to-day, and from such laboratories the ' fieldworkers ' 

 pass out, finding out and reporting on the share parentage and environ- 

 ment have had in the production of the abnormal and the diseased, of 

 the anti-social of all kinds. Some of this work is excellent, some in- 

 different, some perhaps worthless, but this will always be the case in the 

 expansion of new branches of applied science. The training of the 

 Workers must be largely of an experimental character, the technique has 

 to be devised as the work develops. Instructors and directors have to be 



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