144 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
was very natural, and indeed inevitable, that it should be treated by the 
method of the historical sciences so far as those methods were applicable. 
But during the past hundred years there has been a steadily growing 
movement towards the creation of a generalising science of culture or 
society. The moment has come when the existence and independence of 
this science should be recognised. 
I have said that in the early stages of the study of non-European 
peoples the approach made was that of the historical point of view. One 
of the tasks of history is to give us accurate descriptions of a society or 
people at a given time. The ethnographer’s work of describing to us a 
non-European people was taken up precisely in this way. But history 
also gives us chronological accounts of the changes in a people’s life. For 
the European peoples we have written documents that enable the historian 
to do this. For many non-European peoples we have no such records, 
The ethnologist, true to the assumption that history was what he wanted, 
engaged in the attempt to supply a conjectural or hypothetical history. 
The procedure began in the eighteenth century, when attempts were 
made to identify native peoples in different parts of the world as the 
descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, or similarities of custom with 
ancient Egypt were interpreted as the result of Egyptian influence. The 
identification of the lost ten tribes of Israel seems to be no longer the 
concern of anthropologists, but the ingenious tracing of the most diverse 
customs all over the world to a hypothetical origin in Egypt still survives, 
and, as it seems to possess a strong emotional appeal for certain minds, 
will probably persist. 
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, with Adam Smith and 
others in England and France, the hypothetical reconstruction of the past 
took another form. It was supposed that in some sense the less developed 
peoples represented early stages in the development of our own culture. 
The aid of knowledge about them was therefore called in to help in creating 
a conjectural history which dealt with such general matters as the origins 
of language or of civil government, and so on. 
Thus from early times the attempts to utilise information about non- 
European peoples took two distinct forms. It will be convenient to have 
different names by which to distinguish the two studies, and I shall use 
the word ethnology to refer to one and shall speak of the other as belonging 
to social anthropology. This conforms fairly well to the ordinary usage 
of these two terms. 
Ethnology, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is concerned 
with the relations of peoples. If we study the existing peoples of the 
world, and those of the past about which we have information, we are able 
to define certain similarities and differences in racial characters, in culture 
and in language. The ethnologist may confine himself to determining as 
precisely as possible these similarities and differences and so providing 
a classification of peoples on the basis of race, language and culture. If 
he seeks to go further and explain them he does so by hypothetical historical 
processes. It is evident that throughout the period of human life on the 
planet there have been movements and intermingling of races; there has 
been spread of languages, and the subsequent differentiation of one 
language into several distinct languages ; and there have been movements 
