$76 remarks to the ethnology of 
seeks to entertain Ills readers for the moment, would pass over a* 
trilling or suppress from motives of delicacy, cannot, with any 
safety, be omitted if it is desired to advance science. While no 
man who has such an object would describe the vicious prurien¬ 
cies of passion, he will not consider that he deserves censure by 
describing as facts what nature allows to exist without offence to 
modesty, however different the habits of his own nation may be. 
Whatever the observer finds as a general charaeterictic of a people 
ought to be noted, because it is impossible to say w hich facts are 
the most important for purposes of comparison. A fact which his 
own knowledge or taste would lead him to reject, may be one 
which, in itself or in connection with others, is a re cord of times 
antecedent to those in which the more striking peculiarities origina¬ 
ted or received their existing shape, and the true value of which 
may remain undetected until a careful investigation of some other 
country discovers the presence of similar records, and opens up 
chapters of the past which tradition has forgotten, but which may 
thus be better authenticated than those which rest on tradition. 
Every one who has interested himself in comparing any people 
with which lie has the means of being personally acquainted, with 
an account of others apparently related to them, must have fre¬ 
quently experienced a keen disappointment wiien, after detecting 
traces of a remarkable resemblance in traits of character or habits 
promising to lead to important inferences, the chain of analogy has 
suddenly dropped from his hands, from the w'riter of the account 
dismissing the subject as undeserving of further remark. Books 
of travel in little known countries, which should be a record of 
every thing which the traveller can observe, are too frequently a 
simple reflex of what interests himself or what be think may amuse 
the general reader. 
The same necessity for a combination of minuteness and exact¬ 
ness of observation on which we have insisted, is enforced by high¬ 
er considerations. There is no fact in itself mean or unworthy 
ot notice. To say that a thing is common or mean is too often to 
say that our perception of it has become so dimmed from familiarity 
that we have lost the knowledge of its proper import and com¬ 
parative value in the general scheme of things. If all allowed their 
minds to be enslaved by cu$tom ? neither poetry, nor philosophy 
/ 
