Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/70

60 syllables of recorded time; for this, and nothing less than this, is the bold ambition toward which aspires this crowning bough of the tree of human knowledge.

You will readily understand from this the magnitude of the material which anthropology includes within its domain. First, it investigates the physical life of man in all its stages and in every direction. While he is still folded in the womb, it watches his embryonic progress through those lower forms, which seem the reminiscences of far-off stages of the evolution of the species, until the child is born into the world, endowed with the heritage transmitted from innumerable ancestors and already rich in personal experiences from its prenatal life. These combined decide the individual's race and strain, and potently incline, if they do not absolutely coerce, his tastes and ambitions, his fears and hopes, his failure or success.

On the differences thus brought about, and later nourished by the environment, biology, as applied to the human species, is based; and on them as expressed in aggregates, ethnography, the separation of the species into its subspecies and smaller groups, is founded. It has been observed that numerous and persistent although often slight differences arose in remote times, independently, on each of the great continental areas, sufficient to characterize with accuracy these subspecies. We therefore give to such the terms "races" or "varieties" of man.

All these are the physical traits of men. They are studied by the anatomist, the embryologist, the physician; and the closest attention to them is indispensable if we would attain a correct understanding of the creature man and his position in the chain of organic life.

But there is another vast field of study wholly apart from this and even more fruitful in revelations. It illustrates man's mental or psychical nature, his passions and instincts, his emotions and thoughts, his powers of ratiocination, volition, and expression. These are preserved and displayed subjectively in his governments and religions, his laws and his languages, his words and his writings, and, objectively, in his manufactures and structures, in the environment which he himself creates—in other words, in all that which we call the arts, be they "hooked to some useful end" or designed to give pleasure only.

It is not sufficient to study these as we find them in the present. We should learn little by such a procedure. What we are especially seeking is to discover their laws of growth, and this can only be done by tracing these outward expressions of the inward faculties step by step back to their incipiency. This leads us inevitably to that branch of learning which is known as archæology, "the study of ancient things," and more and more