ence, in that we are honestly endeavoring to lay a definite and stable foundation, upon which in time to come a scientific anthropology may be based.
The materials with which we have to do are fully as varied as were those in my illustration, for we as anthropologists take for our motto the sentiment of Chremes, so often quoted in this section, humani nihil a nobis alienum putamus (we think nothing human foreign to us), and they are too often fully as fragmentary. The bones, weapons, and pottery which form our only sources of knowledge concerning prehistoric races of men, generally come to us as much altered from their original forms as are the rusty polyhedra which once were the receptacles of or sardines. The traditions, customs, and scraps of folk lore which are treasures to the constructive anthropologist, are usually discovered as empty shells, in form as much altered from their original conditions as are those smooth fragments of hollow white cylinders which once held the delicate products of the factory of Keiller or Cairns.
I have said that anthropology has not yet made good its title to be ranked as an independent science. This is indicated by the difficulty of framing a definition at the same time comprehensive and distinctive. Mr. Galton characterizes it as the study of what men are in body and mind, how they came to be what they are, and whither the race is tending; General Pitt-Rivers, as the science which ascertains the true causes for all the phenomena of human life. I shall not try to improve upon these definitions, although they both are manifestly defective. On the one side our subject is a branch of biology, but we are more than biologists compiling a monograph on the natural history of our species, as M. de Quatrefages would have it. Many of the problems with which we deal are common to us and to psychologists; others are common to us and to students of history, of sociology, of philology, and of religion; and, in addition, we have to treat of a large number of other matters æsthetic, artistic, and technical, which it is difficult to range under any subordinate category.
In view of the encyclopedic range of knowledge necessary for the equipment of an accomplished anthropologist, it is little wonder that we should be, as we indeed are, little better than smatterers. Its many-sided affinities, its want of definite limitation, and the recent date of its admission to the position of an independent branch of knowledge, have hitherto caused anthropology to fare badly in our universities. In this respect, however, we are improving, and now in the two great English universities there are departments for the study of the natural history of man and of his works.
Out of the great assemblage of topics which come within our
