The Aims of Anthropological Research.

The science of anthropology has grown up from many distinct beginnings. At an early time men were interested in foreign countries and in the lives of their inhabitants. Herodotus reported to the Greeks what he had seen in many lands. Caesar and Tacitus wrote on the customs of the Gauls and Germans. In the Middle Ages Marco Polo, the Venetian, and Ibn Batuta, the Arab, told of the strange peoples of the Far East and of Africa. Later on, Cook’s journeys excited the interest of the world. From these reports arose gradually a desire to find a general significance in the multifarious ways of living of strange peoples. In the eighteenth century Rousseau, Schiller and Herder tried to form, out of the reports of trav­ elers, a picture of the history of mankind. More solid attempts were made about the middle of the nineteenth century, when the comprehensive works of Klemm and Waitz were written. Biologists directed their studies towards an understanding of the varieties of human forms. Linnaeus, Blumenbach, Camper are a few of the names that stand out as early investigators of these problems, which received an entirely new stimulus when Darwin’s views of the instability of species were accepted by the scientific world. The problem of man’s origin and his place in the animal kingdom became the prime subject of interest. Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel are out­ standing names representing this period. Still more recently the intensive study of heredity and mutation has given a new aspect to inquiries into the origin and meaning of race. The development of psychology led to new problems presented by the diversity of the racial and social groups of mankind. The question of mental characteristics of races, which at an earlier period had become a subject of discussion with entirely inadequate methods – largely stimulated by the desire to justify slavery – was taken up again with the more refined technique of exper­ imental psychology, and particular attention is now being paid to the mental status of primitive man and of mental life under pathological condi­ tions. The methods of comparative psychology are not confined to man alone, and much light may be thrown on human behavior by the study of animals. The attempt is being made to develop a genetic psychology. Finally sociology, economics, political science, history and philosophy have found it worth while to study conditions found among alien peoples in 1