Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/72

62 This emphasizes the importance of a prolonged and profound investigation of the few savage tribes who still exist, for, although none of them is as rude or as brutelike as primitive man, they stand nearest to his condition, and, moreover, so rapid nowadays is the extension of culture that probably not one of them will remain untouched by its presence another score of years.

Another discovery, also very recent, has enabled us to throw light on the prehistoric or forgotten past. We have found that much of it, thought to be long since dead, is still alive and in our midst, under forms easily enough recognized when our attention is directed to them. This branch of anthropology is known as folklore. It investigates the stories, the superstitions, the beliefs, and customs which prevail among the unlettered, the isolated, and the young; for these are nothing less than survivals of the mythologies, the legal usages, and the sacred rites of earlier generations. It is surprising to observe how much of the past we have been able to reconstruct from this humble and long-neglected material.

From what I have already said, you will understand some of the aims of anthropology, those which I will call its "immediate" aims. They are embraced in the collection of accurate information about man and men, about the individual and the group, as they exist now and as they have existed at any and all times in the past, here where we are and on every continent and island of the globe.

We desire to know about a man his weight and his measure, the shape of his head, the color of his skin, and the curl of his hair; we would pry into all his secrets and his habits, discover his deficiencies and debilities, learn his language, and inquire about his politics and his religion—yes, probe those recesses of his body and his soul which he conceals from wife and brother. This we would do with every man and every woman, and, not content with the doing it, we would register all these facts in tables and columns, so that they should become perpetual records, to which we give the name "vital statistics."

The generations of the past escape such 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 their proud kings set up. Nothing is sacred to us; and yet nothing to us is vile or worthless. The broken potsherd, with half-gnawed bone, cast on the refuse heap, conveys a message to us more pregnant with meaning, more indicative of what the people were, than the boastful inscription which their king caused to be engraved on royal marble.