Tasmanian savages were crafty warriors and kangaroo-hunters, and the women climbed the highest trees by notching, in quest of opossums. Shell-fish and crabs were taken, and seals knocked on the head with clubs, but neither fish-hook nor fishing-net was known, and indeed swimming fish were taboo as food. Meat and vegetable food, such as fern-root, was broiled over the fire, but boiling in a vessel was unknown. The fire was produced by the ordinary savage fire-drill. Ignorant of agriculture, with no dwellings but rough huts or breakwinds of sticks and bark, without dogs or other domestic animals, these savages, until the coming of civilized man, roamed after food within their tribal bounds. Logs and clumsy floats of bark and grass enabled them to cross water under favourable circumstances. They had clothing of skins rudely stitched together with bark thread, and they were decorated with simple necklaces of kangaroo teeth, shells and berries. Among their simple arts, plaiting and basket-work was one in which they approached the civilized level. The pictorial art of the Tasmanians was poor and childish, quite below that of the Palaeolithic men of Europe. The Tasmanians spoke a fairly copious agglutinating language, well marked as to parts of speech, syntax and inflexion. Numeration was at a low level, based on counting fingers on one hand only, so that the word for man (puggana) stood also for the number 5. The religion of the Tasmanians, when cleared from ideas apparently learnt from the whites, was a simple form of animism based on the shadow (warrawa) being the soul or spirit. The strongest belief of the natives was in the power of the ghosts of the dead, so that they carried the bones of relatives to secure themselves from harm, and they fancied the forest swarming with malignant demons. They placed weapons near the grave for the dead friend’s soul to use, and drove out disease from the sick by exorcising the ghost which was supposed to have caused it. Of greater special spirits of Nature we find something vaguely mentioned. The earliest recorders of the native social life set down such features as their previous experience of rude civilized life had made them judges of. They notice the self-denying affection of the mothers, and the hard treatment of the wives by the husbands, polygamy and the shifting marriage unions. But when we meet with a casual remark as to the tendency of the Tasmanians to take wives from other tribes than their own, it seems likely that they had some custom of exogamy which the foreigners did not understand. Meagre as is the information preserved of the arts, thoughts, and customs of these survivors from the lower Stone Age, it is of value as furnishing even a temporary and tentative means of working out the development of culture on a basis not of conjecture but of fact.
Conclusion.—To-day anthropology is grappling with the heavy task of systematizing the vast stores of knowledge to which the key was found by Boucher de Perthes, by Lartet, Christy and their successors. There have been recently no discoveries to rival in novelty those which followed the exploration of the bone-caves and drift-gravels, and which effected an instant revolution in all accepted theories of man’s antiquity, substituting for a chronology of centuries a vague computation of hundreds of thousands of years. The existence of man in remote geological time cannot now be questioned, but, despite much effort made in likely localities, no bones, with the exception of those of the much-discussed Pithecanthropus, have been found which can be regarded as definitely bridging the gulf between man and the lower creation. It seems as if anthropology had in this direction reached the limits of its discoveries. Far different are the prospects in other directions where the work of co-ordinating the material and facts collected promises to throw much light on the history of civilization. Anthropological researches undertaken all over the globe have shown the necessity of abandoning the old theory that a similarity of customs and superstitions, of arts and crafts, justifies the assumption of a remote relationship, if not an identity of origin, between races. It is now certain that there has ever been an inherent tendency in man, allowing for difference of climate and material surroundings, to develop culture by the same stages and in the same way. American man, for example, need not necessarily owe the minutest portion of his mental, religious, social or industrial development to remote contact with Asia or Europe, though he were proved to possess identical usages. An example in point is that of pyramid-building. No ethnical relationship can ever have existed between the Aztecs and the Egyptians; yet each race developed the idea of the pyramid tomb through that psychological similarity which is as much a characteristic of the species man as is his physique.
Bibliography.—J. C. Prichard, Natural History of Man (London, 1843); T. H. Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (London, 1863); and “Geographical Distribution of Chief Modifications of Mankind,” in Journal Ethnological Society for 1870; E. B. Tylor, Early History of Man (London, 1865), Primitive Culture (London, 1871), and Anthropology (London, 1881); A. de Quatrefages, Histoire générale des races humaines (Paris, 1889), Human Species (Eng. trans., 1879); Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times (1865, 6th ed. 1900) and Origin of Civilization (1870, 6th ed. 1902), Theo. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker (1859–1871), E. H. Haeckel, Anthropogenie (Leipzig, 1874–1891), Eng. trans., 1879; O. Peschel, Völkerkunde (Leipzig, 1874–1897); P. Topinard, L’Anthropologie (Paris, 1876); Éleménts d’anthropologie générale (Paris, 1885); D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples (1890); A. H. Keane, Ethnology (1896), and Man: Past and Present (1899); G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race (Eng. ed., 1889); F. Ratzel, History of Mankind (Eng. trans., 1897); G. de Mortillet, Le Préhistorique (Paris, 1882); A. C. Haddon, Study of Man (1897); J. Deniker, The Races of Man (London, 1900); W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1900, with long bibliography); The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain; Revue d’anthropologie (Paris); Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Berlin). See also bibliographies under separate ethnological headings (Australia, Africa, Arabs, America, &c.). (E. B. T.)
ANTHROPOMETRY (Gr. ἄνθρωπος, man, and μέτρον, measure), the name given by the French savant, Alphonse Bertillon (b. 1853), to a system of identification (q.v.) depending on the unchanging character of certain measurements of parts of the human frame. He found by patient inquiry that several physical features and the dimensions of certain bones or bony structures in the body remain practically constant during adult life. He concluded from this that when these measurements were made and recorded systematically every single individual would be found to be perfectly distinguishable from others. The system was soon adapted to police methods, as the immense value of being able to fix a person’s identity was fully realized, both in preventing false personation and in bringing home to any one charged with an offence his responsibility for previous wrongdoing. “Bertillonage,” as it was called, became widely popular, and after its introduction into France in 1883, where it was soon credited with highly gratifying results, was applied to the administration of justice in most civilized countries. England followed tardily, and it was not until 1894 that an investigation of the methods used and results obtained was made by a special committee sent to Paris for the purpose. It reported favourably, especially on the use of the measurements for primary classification, but recommended also the adoption in part of a system of “finger prints” as suggested by Francis Galton, and already practised in Bengal.
M. Bertillon selected the following five measurements as the basis of his system: (1) head length; (2) head breadth; (3) length of middle finger; (4) of left foot, and (5) of cubit or forearm from the elbow to the extremity of the middle finger. Each principal heading was further subdivided into three classes of “small,” “medium” and “large,” and as an increased guarantee height, length of little finger, and the colour of the eye were also recorded. From this great mass of details, soon represented in Paris by the collection of some 100,000 cards, it was possible, proceeding by exhaustion, to sift and sort down the cards till a small bundle of half a dozen produced the combined facts of the measurements of the individual last sought. The whole of the information is easily contained in one cabinet of very ordinary dimensions, and most ingeniously contrived so as to make the most of the space and facilitate the search. The whole of the record is independent of names, and the final identification is by means of the photograph which lies with the individual’s card of measurements.
Anthropometry, however, gradually fell into disfavour, and it has been generally supplanted by the superior system of finger
