Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/73

Rh This gleaning and gathering, this collecting and storing of facts about man from all quarters of the world and all epochs of his existence, is the first and indispensable aim of anthropologic science. It is pressing and urgent beyond all other aims at this period of its existence as a science, for here more than elsewhere we feel the force of the Hippocratic warning that the time is short and the opportunity fleeting. Every day there perish priceless relics of the past, every year the languages, the habits, and the modes of thought of the surviving tribes which represent the earlier condition of the whole species are increasingly transformed and lost through the extension of civilization. It devolves on the scholars of this generation to be up and doing in these fields of research, for those of the next will find many a chance lost forever of which we can avail ourselves.

And here let me insert a few much-needed words of counsel on this portion of my theme. Why is it that even in scientific circles so little attention is paid to the proper training of observers and collectors in anthropology?

We erect stately museums, we purchase costly specimens, we send out expensive expeditions; but where are the universities, the institutions of higher education, that train young men how to observe, how to explore and collect in this branch? As an eminent ethnologist has remarked, in any other department of science—in that, for instance, which deals with flowers or with butterflies—no institution would dream of sending a collector into the field who lacked all preliminary training in the line or knowledge of it; but in anthropology the opinion seems universal that such preparation is quite needless. Carlyle used to say that every man feels himself competent to be a gentleman farmer or a crown prince; our institutions seem to think that every man is competent to be an anthropologist and archæologist; and let a plausible explorer present himself, the last question put to him will be whether he has any fitness for the job.

Hence our museums are crammed with doubtful specimens, vaguely located, and our volumes of travel with incomplete or wholly incorrect statements, worse than purely fictitious ones, because we know them to be the fruit of honest intentions, and therefore give them credit.

But you will naturally ask. To what end this accumulating and collecting, this filling of museums with the art products of savages and the ghastly contents of charnel houses? Why write down their stupid stories and make notes of their obscene rites? When it shall be done, or as good as done, what use can be made of them beyond satisfying a profitless curiosity?

This leads me to explain another branch of anthropology to which I have not yet alluded—one which introduces us to other