,^ H. — ^ANTHROPOLOGY. 149 



pass out in the classical tripos and aim at settling down in life as a 

 Harley Street consultant; we cannot take a D.Sc. in chemistry as a 

 preliminary to a journalistic career. It is the faculties which provide 

 professional training that are crowded, and men study nowadays physics 

 or chemistry because they wish to be physicists or chemists, or seek by 

 their knowledge of these sciences to reach commercial posts. Even the 

 very Faculty of Arts runs the danger of becoming a professional school 

 for elementary school teachers. I do not approve this state of affairs ; I 

 would merely note its existence. But granted it, what does anthro- 

 pology offer to the young man who for a moment considers it as a 

 possible academic study? There are no professional posts at present 

 open to him, and few academic posts.* There is little to attract the 

 young man to anthropology as a career. Is its position as a training 

 of mind any stronger? The student knows if he studies physics or 

 chemistry or engineeaing that he will obtain a knowledge of the prin- 

 ciples of observation, of measurement, and of the interpretation of data, 

 which will serve him in good stead whenever he has to deal with pheno- 

 mena of any kind. But, alas ! in anthropology, while he finds many 

 things of surpassing interest, he discovers no generally accepted methods 

 of attacking new problems, quot hoviines, tot s&ntentice. The type of 

 man we want in anthropology is precisely the man who now turns to 

 mathematics, to physics, and to astronomy — the man with an exact 

 mind who will not take statements on authority and who beUeves in 

 testing all things. To such a man anthropometry — in all its branches, 

 craniometry, psychometry, and the wide field in which body and mind 

 are tested together under dynamic conditions — forms a splendid training, 

 provided his data and observations are treated as seriously as those of 

 the physicist or astronomer by adequate mathematical analysis. Such a 

 type of man is at once repelled from our science if he finds in its 

 text-books and journals nothing but what has been fitly termed ' kinder- 

 garten arithmetic' Why, the other day I saw in a paper by a dis- 

 tinguished anthropologist an attempt to analyse how many individual 

 bones he ought to measure. He adopted the simple process of comparing 

 the results he obtained when he took 10, 20, 30 individuals. He was 

 not really wiser at the end of his analysis than at the beginning, though 

 he thought he was. And this, notwithstanding that the whole matter 

 had been thrashed out scientifically by John Bernoulli two centuries 

 ago, and that its solution is a commonplace of physicist and astronomer ! 

 How can we expect the scientific world to take us seriously and 

 to treat anthropology as the equal of other sciences while this state 

 of affairs is possible? What discipline in logical exactness are we 

 offering to academic youth which will compare with that of the older 

 sciences ? What claim have we to advise the State until we have intro- 

 duced a sounder technique and ceased to believe that anthropometry is 

 a science that any man can follow, with or without training? As I 

 have hinted, the problems of anthropology seem to me as subtle as 



' In London, for example, there is a reader in physical anthropology who is 

 a teacher in anatomy, and a professorship in ethnology, which for some 

 mysterious reason is included in the faculty of economios and is, I belie\"0. not 

 a full-time appointment. 



