148 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
if we can ever obtain from ethnology any considerable mass of proven 
detailed knowledge of the historical relations of peoples and regions. 
I believe that this feeling is shared by many anthropologists whose 
interest still attaches to history. In the last thirty years or so we have 
watched the development of several diverse schools of ethnology or culture- 
history. Some of these have offered us elaborate schemes of reconstruction 
of the whole of human history; others have dealt with particular local 
problems. But it is impossible to reconcile the different theories with 
one another or even to discover principles of method about which there 
is general agreement. To say nothing of theories of the derivation of 
culture from a lost Atlantis or a lost Pacific continent, we are offered a 
choice between the Egyptian theory championed in its latest form by 
Prof. Elliot Smith, or the theory of culture-cycles of Graebner, or the 
somewhat different theory of Father Schmidt, or that of Frobenius, and 
T know not how many more. Each school goes its own way building up 
its own hypothetical structure, not attempting to seek out points on 
which agreement can be reached with others. The procedure is often that 
of disciples of a cult rather than that of students of a science. The result 
is that many would-be ethnologists, seeing how much hypothesis and how 
little certainty there is in these reconstructions of history, have been 
turning to archeology, in which at least some certainty and general agree- 
ment can be reached. This movement I think is a thoroughly sound one. 
Where written documents are absent it is first of all to archeology that 
we must look to give us some knowledge of the history of peoples and 
cultures. 
If then we set out to study human life by the methods of historical 
science, we aim at discovering everything that we can of interest about the 
past. When written records are available we make use of them, and such 
study is called history in the narrow sense. We may supplement the 
written records by investigations in archeology. This study has reached 
a stage when it can give us precise and certain information within a limited 
field. It can only tell us about those things in the life of a people that 
can be directly inferred from their material remains. Ethnology can to 
a limited extent supplement history and archeology. 
The historical interest in human life is one of the chief motives for 
the study of non-European peoples. But the same study offers scope for 
another interest, the desire to reach a scientific understanding of the nature 
of culture and of social life. In the past those two interests have been 
often confused. The progress of our studies requires that they be 
separated, and this separation has been taking place during the last few 
decades. Out of social anthropology there has grown a study which I am 
going to speak of as Comparative Sociology. 
By this term I wish to denote a science that applies the generalising 
method of the natural sciences to the phenomena of the social life of man 
and to everything that we include under the term culture or civilisation. 
The method may be defined as being one by which we demonstrate 
that a particular phenomenon or event is an example of a general law. 
In the study of any group of phenomena we aim at discovering laws which 
are universal within that group. When those laws are discovered they 
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