October 22, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



375 



mind who will not take statements on author- 

 ity and who believes in testing all things. 

 To such a man anthropometry — in all its 

 branches, craniometry, psychometry and the 

 wide field in which body and mind are tested 

 together imider dynamic conditions — forms a 

 splendid training, provided his data and ob- 

 servations are treated as seriously as those of 

 the physicist or astronomer by adequate 

 mathematical analysis. Such a type of man 

 is at once repelled from our science if he finds 

 in its text-books and journals nothing but 

 what has been fitly termed " kindergarten 

 arithmetic." Why the other day I saw a 

 paper by a distinguished anthropologist an 

 attempt to analyze how many individual bones 

 he ought to measure. He adopted the simple 

 process of comparing the results he obtained 

 when he took 10, 20, 30 individuals. He was 

 not really wiser at the end of his analysis 

 than at the beginning, though he thought he 

 was. And this, notwithstanding that the 

 whole matter had been thrashed out scientific- 

 ally by John Bernoulli two centuries ago, 

 and that its soluton is a commonplace of 

 physicist and astronomer! 



How can we expect the scientific world to 

 take us seriously and to treat anthropology 

 as the equal of other sciences while this state 

 of affairs is possible? What discipline in 

 logical exactness are we offering to academic 

 youth which will compare with that of the 

 older sciences? What claim have we to ad- 

 vise the state until we have introduced a 

 soimder technique and ceased to believe that 

 anthropometTy is a science that any man can 

 follow, with or without training? As I have 

 hinted, the problems of anthropology seem to 

 me as subtle as those of physical astronomy, 

 and we are not going to solve them with rusty 

 weapons, nor solve them at all unless we can 

 persuade the " brainy boys " of our universi- 

 ties that they are worthy of keen minds. 

 Hence it seems to me that the most fertile 

 training for academic purposes in anthro- 

 pology is that which starts from anthropo- 

 metry in its broadest sense, which begins to 

 differentiate caste and class and race, bodily 

 and mental health and disease, by measure- 



ment and by the analysis of measurement. 

 Once this sound groimding has been reached 

 the trained mind may advance to ethnology 

 and sociology, to prehistory and the evolution 

 of man. And I shall be surprised if equal 

 accuracy of statement and equal logic of de- 

 duction be not then demanded in these fields, 

 and I am more than half convinced, nay, I 

 am certain, that the technique the student 

 will apply in anthropometry can be equally 

 well applied in the wider fields into which he 

 will advance in his later studies. Give an- 

 thropology a technique as accurate as that of 

 physics, and it will forge ahead as physics 

 has done, and then anthropologists will take 

 their due place in the world of science and 

 in the service of the state. 



Francis Galton has a claim upon the atten- 

 tion of anthropologists which I have not. He 

 has been president of your institute, and he 

 spoke just thirty-five years ago from the chair 

 I now occupy, pressing on you for the first 

 time the claims of new anthropological meth- 

 ods. In Galton's words : " Until the phenom- 

 ena of any branch of knowledge have been sub- 

 mitted to measurement and number it Can not 

 assume the status and digiaity of a science." 

 Have we not rather forgotten those warning 

 words, and do they not to some extent explain 

 why our universities and learned societies, why 

 the state and statesmen, have turned the cold 

 shoulder on anthropology? 



This condition of affairs must not continue; 

 it is good neither for anthropology, nor for the 

 universities, nor for the state if this funda- 

 mental science, the science of man, remains in 

 neglect. It will not continue if anthropologists 

 pull together and insist that their problems 

 shall not fail in utility, that their scientific 

 technique shall be up to date, and that anthro- 

 pological training shall be a reality in our uni- 

 versities — that these shall be fully equipped 

 with museums, with material, with teachers 

 and students. 



It is almost as difficult to reform a science as 

 it is to reform a religion; in both cases the 

 would-be-reformer will offend the sacrosanct 

 upholders of tradition, who find it hard to dis- 

 card the faith in which they have been reared. 



