‘ SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.—H. 457 
- Miss W. Buackman.—Egyptian Tattoo Designs, their Magical and Decorative 
Significance. 
Capt. G. Prrt-Rivers.—Anthropological Approach to Eugenics. 
While Anthropology as a background of all sociological education has, from the 
inception of that science, been neglected, there is a growing appreciation of the 
positive contributions to national health and well-being that anthropological research 
can make. The applications of a science must remain indeterminate, and the 
_ systematic extension in its scope is likely to remain undeveloped, until its methodology 
has been satisfactorily formulated. For this reason alone Anthropology has remained 
for so long a very young science. It is significant that some of the discussion on the 
methodology of the science in 1875, and some of the criticism, is as relevant and valid 
to-day as it was then. 
Evolution, regarded in terms of growth forces in a changing milieu, is a process of 
_ adaptation to modifications in environmental conditions. 
Inbreeding and outbreeding as factors in adaptation open out a field so far very 
little explored. These factors affecting Constitution clearly are related to problems 
of Culture and the social organisation of exogamic and endogamic customs. In these 
processes the rates of elimination and selection are measurable in demographic terms. 
Variation in the survival rates of distinguishable groups touches on all the 
anthropological problems concerned with the influences, cultural, physical and 
environmental, that affect the extinction or the survival of ethnic types or variations. 
Quantitative changes bring about qualitative changes. In so far as these 
influences are capable of social control or direction they are also the problems of 
eugenics. Eugenics is, therefore, seen as the study of those forces amenable to social 
control, which can influence the fertility and survival rate of variations of type in a 
population. The significance of demographic data. A consideration of group 
variations in maternal mortality, and in infant mortality. Examples drawn from 
variations in sex-ratio. The usefulness of anthropological researches is exemplified 
in its eugenical bearings. 
Miss L. Marr.—Economie Man in Primitive Society. 
Modern Economics the science of human acquisitiveness ; its method to isolate 
1 he acquisitive side of human activities and study this on the assumption that in all 
his economic relationships man is predominantly actuated by calculations of material 
gain. In modern society individualistic acquisitiveness plays such an important 
a ‘that thisis approximately true; economists of course admit that the abstraction 
“economic man’ never existed. 
But primitive economics cannot be described or reconstructed by reducing modern 
economic laws to their simplest terms, because among primitive peoples—largely 
ywing to the limited possibilities of acquiring wealth—other than economic con- 
siderations play a much more important part in their economic relationships. This 
point can be illustrated from various primitive societies in East Africa, 
Three main non-economic elements emerge : 
1. The religious attitude towards possessions—land or cattle—(this is coupled 
with the impossibility of obtaining, in primitive conditions, any economic equivalent 
for the fundamental means of livelihood). 
_ 2. The principle of the kinship group as economic co-operative (especially land- 
pwning) unit ; hence various purely non-economic relationships have to be created on 
admission of strangers to cultivate land, or herd cattle. Adoption ceremonies ; 
ties towards owner; return made not in any sense an economic equivalent, or so 
egarded ; moral obligation on owner not to dispossess tenant. 
_ 3. Most important ways in which wealth circulates not primarily economic ; 
payment of bride-price, payment of compensation, gifts to chief from which he is 
expected to support the poor and needy ; general principle of responsibility of a group 
towards its poorer members. 
~ 
Dr. Creriant.—The Origin of the Bantu. 
