156 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Evolutionary School gives place to the Historical. By degrees we are 

 becoming aware that the civilisation of backward peoples is more com- 

 plex than was at first believed ; that they, too, have had as long a history 

 as ourselves, even though it may have been less eventful. We are 

 giving up the belief that such people are human fossils, and that they 

 have preserved our ancestral types alive to the present day, for we are 

 realising that they represent not so much our ancestors as our poor 

 relations. 



On the other hand, though, perhaps, we must abandon the ancestral 

 view, and cease to believe that these backward communities represent 

 accurately to-day the conditions under which we dwelt in long past 

 millennia, the customs and institutions of these folk are in many respects 

 less complex than our own, and it is possible to study them from every 

 aspect with far gi'eater ease than we could do in the case of one of the 

 higher civilisations. Since it is one of the functions of anthropology 

 to study man synthetically, this is a great advantage. "When dealing 

 with these simpler problems we can evolve a method and a discipline 

 to be applied in more complicated cases. Again, the backward peoples 

 have, as a rule, no written history, and we are forced in this case to 

 restore their past by other means. This has led to the development of 

 fresh methods of attacking the problems of the past, which may prove 

 of value in the case of more advanced communities, where written 

 evidence exists, it is true, but is, to some extent at least, faulty, 

 imperfect, or unreliable. 



For these reasons the study of backward peoples still has great 

 value for the anthropologist. He has not yet solved all the problems 

 concerned with the dawn of civilisation, nor has he yet perfected his 

 methods and discipline. Although vast quantities of observations, good, 

 bad, and indifferent, by trained workers and dilettante travellers, have 

 been placed on record, especially during the last half-century, there is 

 much more to be collected from this fast disappearing mass. More 

 workers and expert workers are needed in this field, and so it is that 

 our universities devote the greater part of their energies to training 

 students for this purpose. 



But there are many students, equally interested in the evolution of 

 man and his works, who cannot, for one reason or another, visit wild 

 lands to study the ways of their inhabitants. Some of these, it is 

 true, may sift and arrange the vast mass of material collected by their 

 more fortunate colleagues, though they will be at considerable disadvan- 

 tage when undertaking this work if they have had no personal experience 

 of the lands and the people with which their material is dealing. 



The time seems to have arrived when anthropologists should not 

 concentrate so exclusively upon these lowly cultures, but might carry 

 on their researches into those civilisations which have advanced further 

 in their evolution. Not that I wish to be understood as deprecating 

 in any way the study of backward peoples, or as discouraging students 

 from researches in that direction. But I would suggest that the time 

 has arrived when some anthropologists might initiate a closer inquiry 

 into the conditions of more civilised peoples, not in the place of but 

 in addition to the studies already described. 



