The New Student's Reference Work/Anthropology

An'thropol'ogy, a wide and comprehensive term, otherwise expressed as the science of man, and treating of man's nature, origin, history, etc, especially as a social animal, living in groups either by nature or from choice or necessity. Sociology is a term somewhat akin to it, though specifically dealing with society as a whole, its structure and organizations, the laws of its development, as shown in the evolution of man in communities, and of what we know as actual civilization. Again akin to what is termed anthropology is ethnography, which treats of the races of men in the geographical groups or tribes in which they are met; while ethnology deals with tie customs, languages and institutions of mankind in general. Anthropology, in the main, embraces what is usually dealt with in the two latter sciences. The physical aspect and characteristics of the race, varied as they are by climate and temperature, including the cranium, limbs, facial features, height and shape of the body and other descriptive details, belong to the classification of physical anthropology; while the industrial and utilitarian arts in which man employs himself or is employed, together with the tools with which he works, are covered by the term technology. Men in their lawless, vicious state as criminals, felons and outlaws of society, transgressing its laws and defying its proprieties and conventionalities, are studied and treated of under criminal anthropology, by investigators in police offices and prisons, who endeavor to set forth the hereditary, congenital and other causes that create the criminal classes and leave the imprint of crime upon them as a distinct physiognomical and racial type.