SEPTEMBER 17, 1897. ] 
with the stars and passing to minerals and 
plants and animals, and through the soil 
on which plants and animals live, reached 
man himself; yet the studied observation 
began not so much with fellow-citizens or 
fellow-subjects bound to the student hy ties 
of consanguinity and affinity as with the 
abject savage or half-clad barbarian of dis- 
tant lands; and even to-day, and in the 
most enlightened nations of the earth, the 
pictures brought up in most minds by the 
term Anthropology are those of alien and 
inferior peoples, or of human curiosities 
and monstrosities exhibited in midway 
plaisanees, if not in circuses and dime mu- 
seums. Hyen in scientific circles—yea, 
among those ranked as anthropologists— 
there are many who habitually restrict the 
term to the purely animal side of Man, and 
and ignore that broader and nobler side 
which distinguishes mankind from all other 
things. So, whether science ke viewed in 
general or detail, it is found that its progress 
is toward the ego—toward the everyday 
and commonplace, perhaps, yet ever toward 
the more important because nearer, the 
more useful because the commoner; and 
the more nearly it approaches the more 
clearly it is seen that science dignifies both 
student and object of study—that exact 
knowledge, with Midas touch, turns dross 
to gold. 
2. In general, research begins with the 
abnormal and proceeds toward the normal. 
Judging from the habits of present-day 
barbarians among whom the tempest is 
studied and the zephyr ignored, the comet 
remembered and the planet forgotten, the 
pre-Chaldean astronomers based their first 
_ celestial observations on the erratic wander- 
ers rather than the orderly travelers of the 
sky ; and in all ages prodigies—the bizarre 
and ill-formed, the gigantic and dwarfish — 
have been the first to catch and the longest 
to hold attention, among casual observers 
and specialists alike. This tendency toward 
SCIENCE. 
419 
noting the abnormal, like that of regard- 
ing the rare rather than the common, is the 
easily besetting sin of the touring naturalist 
and local museum collector, the joy of the 
unscientific and the despair of the scientific 
among museum administrators. Clearly 
seen in geology and zoology and botany as 
the vestige of a primitive past, this tendency 
to perceive only the abnormal is still strong 
—indeed almost dominant—in the younger 
science of anthropology ; to-day distorted 
or wounded or cachectic skulls from the 
ancient ossuaries of Africa or the huacals of 
Peru are esteemed far above normal crania 
of a normal people who have by normal 
activities aided in making civilization and 
ennobling the world; to-day the platycnemic 
tibia and perforate humerus of questionable 
significance are exalted above the normal 
members occupied in the march of progress 
and the conquest of lower nature; to-day 
there are a flourishing sub-science called 
criminology and a fantastic fad of extolling 
and magnifying degeneracy, while the up- 
right in mind and the sound in body are 
relatively neglected; yet this apparently 
morbid taste but reflects a tendency of the 
human mind, and is the promise of better 
things when the intellect awakened by the 
abnormal acquires the power of appreciating 
thenormal. Unremembered milleniums of 
mystical shamanism were required to pro- 
duce pathology and therapeutics, and 
centuries of pathology were needed to pro- - 
duce sound physiology and etiology, and in 
like manner there were generations of 
mystical and irrational psychomancy before 
students were able to recognize a basis for 
the modern and most promising science of 
psychology. It smacks of the paradox to 
say that the beginning with the abnormal 
is the normal course in the making of 
science; yet the history of each and all of 
the sciences shows that observation on the 
abnormal has always led attention to the 
normal, just as observation on the remote 
