Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/759

Rh object and as a great group of innumerable discrete individuals possessing many qualities, constitutes the primary datum of sociological study. First, this being may be described (ethnography) and subdivided into different races (ethnology), and then special attention may be given to his physical constitution (somatology), and also to what he produces (technology). Closely associated with this last, indeed an important part of it, is the search for the record he has left, consisting almost exclusively of such products belonging to past periods and preserved from destruction. This is archæology. But many of his productions are not material, and consist of institutions of various kinds. Using this term in a broad sense institutions embrace language, customs, governments, religions, industries, and ultimately art and literature. The study of these constitutes real history as distinguished from the mere "histoire-bataille." Migrations and the vicissitudes of empire, even the doings of the persons who happen to stand in the front of these movements, belong here, but their importance is apt to be exaggerated. All of these great fields of activity are capable of being divided and subdivided, and each little part erected into a science to be specially studied. The study of language forms the science of philology. Out of government there unfolds the great field of law and jurisprudence. The study of industry opens out in one direction into the field of political economy and in another into that of invention, machinery, and all the arts of civilization. History becomes crystallized in the form of statistics, which is the algebra of events.

Now all this vast array of phenomena manifested by man in his manifold relations with the material world constitutes the data of sociology, and something must be known about it before any one is capable of entering into the consideration of those higher laws involved in human association, which, on final analysis, are simply generalizations from the facts of lower orders. It is true that in the course of acquiring a sound general education every one necessarily learns something about most of these things, but this is insufficient to constitute an adequate prepara-