138 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Governments delay, collections and enthusiasts are lost, and yet another 

 British opportunity becomes acclimatised elsewhere. It is not yet too 

 late, but soon it will be. 



That our specialists in the study of material culture are few in number 

 because of a lack of chances and incentives, can scarcely be doubted. 

 This leads in turn to inadequate descriptive and comparative work, and 

 to a partial neglect of those problems of analysis and synthesis to which 

 so much attention is given by American and Continental anthropologists. 

 A training in the dissection of animals is perhaps conducive to a leaning 

 towards analysis rather than synthesis, but at the same time it is the 

 evolutionary problems that offer most attractions to one who is 

 biologically-minded. In what I have to say to-day, I am trying to 

 express conclusions that have developed in my own mind in the course of 

 many years of contact with the material products of backward peoples, 

 as well as with the theories and views of those whose artefacts and 

 formulae have reached a more bewildering complexity. If any psychologists 

 are present my apologies are due to them, and I can only hope that they 

 will be induced to demonstrate my errors by focussing their brighter light 

 upon the human mental processes which I have tried to explore a little 

 further by my own candle-power. 



Objective and Subjective Pkoblems. 

 Some features of the evolutionary aspects of human material culture 

 have received occasional attention since relatively early times, but no 

 systematic treatment of the subject was attempted until Lane-Fox 

 Pitt-Rivers did so much to establish the analogies that link the evolution 

 of living organisms with that of human artefacts. My immediate, as 

 well as remote, predecessor in this chair, Mr. Henry Balfour, in his 

 Presidential Address in 1904, gave a summary of the methods and con- 

 clusions of Pitt-Rivers, together with an account of his own attitude 

 towards some of the problems that emerge from the study of the develop- 

 ment of artefacts. Since the date of that address, the question of the 

 occurrence, or frequency of occurrence, of independent evolution, has 

 become so much more insistent, that it seems worth while to re-examine 

 in some detail the nature of the subjective processes that lead to discovery 

 and invention, and of the objective outcome of these processes. In the 

 course of his address, Mr. Balfour expressed the view that independent 

 evolution should only be accepted as an explanation of similarity after an 

 exhaustive enquiry into the possibilities of transmission ; he did not, 

 however, seek to put independent evolution out of court, since he said 

 ' Polygenesis in his inventions may probably be regarded as testimony in 

 favour of the monogenesis of man.' Prof. Elliot Smith, in his address to 

 this section in 1912 (and elsewhere still more forcibly) lays great stress 

 upon the essential conservatism of the human mind, and upon the fact 

 that ' for the vast majority of mankind almost the sum total of their 

 mental activities consists of imitation or acquiring and using the common 

 stock of knowledge.' Others both here and abroad have taken up similar 

 positions, but there still remain many whose attitude towards independent 

 evolution is tolerant and even generous, and it is to these that the mis- 

 leading term ' evolutionists ' may be supposed to apply. Whether the 



