Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/233

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remain for an indefinite period in the condition in which they now exist and as they have existed for ages past, with little or no change, to be investigated at leisure at any future time. On the surface of the earth, however, animals and plants and races of men are perishing rapidly day by day, and will soon be, like the Dodo, things of the past. The history of these things once gone can never be recovered, but must remain forever a gap in the knowledge of mankind.

The loss will be most deeply felt in the province of anthropology, a science which is of higher importance to us than any other, as treating of the developmental history of our own species. The languages of Polynesia are being rapidly destroyed or mutilated, and the opportunity of obtaining accurate information concerning these and the native habits of culture will soon have passed away.

Many other naturalists besides Moseley have been impressed with the need there is for the study of native races, indeed most of the zoologists who have traveled afield have turned their attention to anthropology, in the broadest sense of the term and not a few have partially, or even entirely, relinquished the study of zoology for that of anthropology. The reason is to be sought not only in the interest of the study of man, but in the conviction that the opportunities for that study are fast slipping away and fastest in those countries where the most important results are likely to be obtained.

In many islands the natives are rapidly dying out, and in more they have become so modified by contact with the white man and by crossings due to deportation by Europeans, that immediate steps are necessary to record the anthropological data that remain. Only those who have a personal acquaintance with Oceania, or those who have carefully followed the recent literature of the subject, can have an idea of the pressing need there is for prompt action. No one can deny that it is our bounden duty to record the physical characteristics, the handicrafts, the psychology, ceremonial observances and religious beliefs of vanishing peoples; this also is a work which in many cases can alone be accomplished by the present generation.

How often have I, when questioning the younger men about their old custom, been told, 'Me young man, me no savvy, old man he savvy,' and so it was. Even a quarter of a century of contact with the white man will cause the attenuation or disappearance of old customs, the memory of which is retained only by a few old men; when these die the full knowledge of the old cults dies too.

I often wonder what the ethnologist of the future will think of us. The Tasmanians have entirely disappeared and we know extremely little about this primitive people. Howitt, Tison, Spencer, Gillen and Walter Roth have done memorable work among the Australians, but if these few men had not labored how much should we really know about the meaning of the social and religious observances of a rapidly vanishing people?