Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/324

 308 upon other races to whom they have no such significance, and who in incorporating them give to them a new local color. These pseudomorphs of the earlier cultures are among the most perplexing of the problems which the student of comparative religion or folk lore has to resolve.

But we want more than a perfect nomenclature to bring anthropology into range with the true sciences. We need a broader basis of ascertained fact for inductive reasoning in almost all parts of our subject; we want men trained in exact method who will work patiently at the accumulation, verification, and sorting of facts, and who will not prematurely rush into theory. We have had enough of the untrained writer of papers, the jerry-builder of unfounded hypotheses whose ruins cumber our field of work.

The present position of our subject is critical and peculiar: while on the one hand the facilities for anthropological research are daily growing greater, yet in some directions the material is diminishing in quantity and accessibility. We are accumulating in our museums treasures both of the structure and the works of man, classified according to his distribution in time and space; but at the same time some of the most interesting tribes have vanished, and others are rapidly disappearing or becoming fused with their neighbors. As these pass out of existence we, with them, have lost their thoughts, their tongues, and their traditions; for even when they survive, blended with other races, that which was a religion has become a fragmentary superstition, then a nursery tale or a child's game, and is destined finally to be buried in oblivion. The unifying influences of commerce, aided by steam and electricity, are effectually effacing the landmarks between people and people, so that if we are to preserve in a form fit for future use the shreds which remain of the myths, folk lore, and linguistic usages of many of the tribes of humanity, we must be up and doing without delay. It is on this account that systematic research such as that which Mr. Risley has advocated with regard to the different races of India is of such pressing and urgent importance. It is for this reason, likewise, that we hail with pleasure the gathering of folk lore while yet it survives, and welcome such societies for the purpose as the Folk-lore Congress recently inaugurated.

I have said that in the department of physical anthropology our facilities for research are increasing. The newly founded anthropometric laboratories are beginning to bring forth results in the form of carefully compiled statistical tables, embodying the fruits of accurate observations, which are useful as far as they go. Were these extended in their scope the same machinery might easily gather particulars as to the physical characters of