Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/652

632 issued a list of queries, and students of special subjects have catechised missionaries and other residents abroad.

On these foundations has been reared what Max Müller disdainfully names agriology, what the late Mr. Freeman, the historian, invidiously styled "Mr. Taylor's science" and what is, in fact, the science of sociology. In its pre-scientific stage it consisted of premature generalizations on an insufficient basis of facts, such as are to be found in the still interesting works of Goguet and De Brosses, Monboddo and Kaimes. Sometimes it gave rise to a great idea in other sciences. Observing the poverty-stricken flora and fauna of Australia, Cook mused on the agencies which kept the Australians within the limits of subsistence. His speculations dropped in Malthus's pregnant mind the seed of the law of population. As is better known, that law put into Darwin's hands the key to organic evolution. Cook begat Malthus and Malthus begat Darwin—that is the genealogy of natural selection. Special researches began. Prof. John Millar's Origin of Ranks, of which the third edition was published so long ago as 1781, shows how near a man may be to a discovery without making it. Only after eighty years did his inchoate speculation issue in the most finished piece of inductive research that sociology has to show—McLennan's Primitive Marriage. Mr. Tylor, the best-equipped and most judicious of contemporary sociographers, has skillfully tracked social phenomena on a dozen different lines all round the globe. And these pioneers have been followed by a host of explorers, from Florence to Stockholm and from Moscow to San Francisco. Systematic science at last arrives. Comte named and rightly placed sociology in the circle, or the tree, of the sciences, and his prior treatise is enriched with a wealth of thought unequaled since Montesquieu. But his construction is vitiated by the mechanical conception of society that bore such Dead Sea fruit in the Politique; and without the indispensable foundations supplied by a study of primitive peoples it is a mere "Spanish castle" a structure in the air. A vital conception of society and the tracing of existing institutions, rites, and ideas to their roots in these peoples made Herbert Spencer the true founder of sociology. The carving out of the social subsciences—a task that baffled the keen intellect of Mill—was struck off by this great thinker at a heat. The classification which forms the skeleton of his Descriptive Sociology is an analytical masterpiece that evoked the enthusiasm of Taine. As it has already been made by two able assistants (Dr. Duncan and Dr. Scheppig) the framework of exhaustive descriptions of the savage and semi-civilized races, so will it be the schema of all future sociological research.

Art as well as science has been born of the contact with indigenes.