Introduction
Spencer, and Huxley, was yet to dawn. So much for Anthropology on the physical side; when we seek for scientific authors who have tried to deal with mankind on a broad basis, both from the physical and cultural points of view, we find only Prichard and, perhaps, Desmoulins. It is difficult to believe that Prescott had not at least read Prichard's earlier works, though he never quotes him, but the monumental Natural History of Man was not published until 1843.
So far I have mentioned names which serve to illustrate the embryonic stage of Anthropological science in Prescott's day; I come now to the authors whose researches have a more direct bearing upon the particular problems with which he was confronted. Prescott's method is, from one point of view, an early attempt at comparative ethnology, and, to judge from the material at his command, a very successful attempt. But the time of Edward Burnett Tylor, who first raised that branch of Anthropology to a science, was not yet, and one wonders what would have been the effect upon Prescott's acute brain if he had but skimmed the pages of The Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871) which have so profoundly influenced modern thought. Again, Sociology, as we now understand it, was practically non-existent. Comte, it is true, was available; but Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Bachofen, Morgan (the founder of Sociology as a science) and M'Lennan had not produced the works which render their names memorable. Psychology, too, was in its infancy, and it was not brought into true relationship with ethnological studies until the time of Bastian, who was the first to insist upon its Anthropological significance. And Bastian was only seventeen when the Conquest of Mexico was published. The question of primitive religion had not really been faced in Prescott's day. An unbending, though sincere, church was still blind to the many pagan survivals which it embodied, and which brought some of its rites into direct relation with the ceremonies of primitive peoples, still regarded by a large majority as the direct inspiration of a personal devil. While insisting upon the purely symbolic nature of much of its own ceremonial, it could see no symbolism in the practices of the pagan. It could not even realise how easily symbolism becomes degraded to magic, how easily magic becomes rationalised to symbolism. That, even in one social complex, the symbolism of the educated is magic in the eyes of the uneducated. Yet, in spite of the atmosphere of his day, Prescott maintains a surprising equilibrium in
xxi
