Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/133

Rh of folklore, inasmuch as "the stories, the superstitions, the beliefs, and customs which prevail among the unlettered, the isolated, and the young, are nothing else than survivals of the mythologies, the legal usages, and the sacred rites of earlier generations. It is surprising," he adds, "to observe how much of the past we have been able to construct from this humble and long-neglected material."

The zeal of the learned doctor seems almost to assume a slight character of ferocity when he goes on to declare: "The generations of the past escape our personal investigation, but not our pursuit. We rifle their graves, measure their skulls, and analyze their bones; we carry to our museums the utensils and weapons, the gods and jewels, which sad and loving hands laid beside them; we dig up the foundations of their houses, and cart off the monuments which proud kings set up. Nothing is sacred to us; and yet nothing to us is vile or worthless." If the doctor had wished to quote Horace, he might have said very appositely "omne sacrum rapiente dextrâ"; but we should be loath to take him at his word that to the anthropologist nothing is sacred. We believe, on the contrary, that to the true anthropologist the cause of humanity is very sacred; and that it is because an exhaustive knowledge of what man has been and is will, as he considers, greatly advance human well-being, by placing our systems of instruction and all our social arrangements on a more scientific basis, that, in his consuming desire for knowledge, he is prepared even for spoliation.

One of the most important branches or subdivisions of anthropology is ethnology. Its mission, Dr. Brinton says, is "to define the universal in humanity." It aims to define "the influences which the geographical and other environment exercises on the individual, the social group, and the race; and conversely how much in each remains unaltered by these external forces." Like political economy, according to its orthodox professors at least, it has nothing to do with what ought to be; its sole concern is with what is. Ethnology, the doctor asserts with some emphasis, lends no countenance to any absolute doctrine of evolution. He considers that, "taken at its real value, as the provisional and partial result of our observations," that doctrine is a useful guide, but that, "swallowed with unquestioning faith as a final law of the universe," it is no better than the narrowest traditional dogma. At this point we may venture to suggest that the learned doctor is waxing wroth with an imaginary foe, or, if not with an imaginary one, at least with one hardly worthy of his ire. Idle talk about evolution can no more be prevented than idle talk about any other subject, say electricity for example, which some persons believe to be a device, invented probably by Mr. Edison, for getting something out of nothing. No one whose opinion is worth discussing regards evolution otherwise than as a name for the process by which such advancement as the world has hitherto made has been won, and on which we may reasonably depend for further progress in the future. Nature as yet having given no sign that her powers are exhausted or on the point of exhaustion. "The development of humanity as a whole," says Dr. Brinton, "has arisen from the differences of its component parts, its races, nations, tribes. Their specific peculiarities have brought about the struggles which, in the main, have resulted in an advance." Even so, we may hope that in the future, in spite