604 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 879 



coordination, as far as the relation of indus- 

 trial organizations to government science is 

 concerned, arising from the fact that scien- 

 tists in the government bureaus often have 

 no adequate knowledge of the industries af- 

 fected by the regulations which they are 

 called upon to draw up and enforce and 

 hence they are not in a position to properly 

 distinguish between attempts to evade the 

 law and real protests concerning unnecessar- 

 ily restrictive rulings. Very few business 

 concerns are engaged in anything com- 

 parable with the sugar trust frauds or would 

 countenance ansrthing of the kind, yet " Wash- 

 ington scientists " are apparently unduly 

 influenced by such cases and do not appear 

 to give sufficient thought to the thousands of 

 concerns with whom they never have any 

 trouble. 



The remedy for this condition would ap- 

 pear to lie in the employment of a number of 

 scientists in the executive work of the bureaus 

 who have had adequate training in the indus- 

 tries affected, in place of the present plan of 

 selecting all scientists for government work 

 from men who have devoted their entire 

 previous time to theoretical study and teach- 

 ing. 



In the ultimate analysis the industries of 

 the country appear to be the financial founda- 

 tion upon which our government rests, hence 

 I would suggest that inhabitants of the struc- 

 ture occupying " top floor front rooms " 

 should be a little more conservative in their 

 treatment of this same foundation. 



Industrul Engineer 



the methods op american ethnologists 

 To THE Editor of Science: American stu- 

 dents will welcome the views propounded by 

 Dr. Eivers in his presidential address before 

 the Anthropological Section of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science 

 (Science, September 29, 1911). Nevertheless, 

 were Dr. Eivers telescopically gifted, he 

 would assuredly read nothing but amazement 

 and surprise in the expression of American 

 ethnologists' eyes as they peruse his extra- 

 ordinary characterization of their activity as 



compared with that of their colleagues in 

 other lands. 



Dr. Eivers's paper is essentially a declara- 

 tion of independence from the traditional 

 point of view of his compatriots, who, to use 

 his own words, have been " inspired primarily 

 by the idea of evolution founded on a psychol- 

 ogy common to mankind as a whole." His 

 own investigations in Melanesia have con- 

 verted Dr. Eivers to the teachings of the geo- 

 graphical or " ethnological " school, whose 

 home, past and present, he finds in Germany. 

 He has arrived at the conclusion that a direct 

 psychological interpretation of cultural phe- 

 nomena is impossible, because it ignores the 

 demonstrable blending of different cultures. 

 Psychological analysis, he contends, must be 

 preceded by an ethnological analysis : " . . . 

 if cultures are complex, their analysis is a 

 preliminary step which is necessary if specu- 

 lations concerning the evolution of human 

 society, its beliefs and practises, are to rest on 

 a firm foundation" (p. 391). 



Apparently, Dr. Eivers has never met with 

 any thing like such views in the writings of 

 American ethnologists, for among these he 

 recognizes only either purely descriptive re- 

 corders of data concerning the Indians, or 

 writers who, like Kroeber in his " Classifica- 

 tory Systems of Eelationship " and like 

 Goldenweiser in his " Totemism : an Analyti- 

 cal Study," investigate social problems from 

 a purely psychological point of view. 



Now, as early as 1895, Dr. Boas was led by 

 his study of mythology to an expression of 

 opinion so closely resembling the recent utter- 

 ances of Dr. Eivers that it is almost incon- 

 ceivable how the resemblance could fail to be 

 noticed. At the conclusion of his " Indian- 

 ische Sagen von der nord-pacifischen Kiiste 

 Amerikas " (p. 353), Boas emphatically pro- 

 tests against a direct interpretation of myths 

 as expressions of universal ideas before in- 

 vestigating the historical and geographical 

 causes conditioning the growth of mytholog- 

 ical tales. A still more comprehensive state- 

 ment appears in the same writer's " Introduc- 

 tion" to the "Publications of the Jesup 

 North Pacific Expedition" (Vol. I., 1898- 



