Excerpt from Reports Upon the Present Condition and Future Needs of the Science of Anthropology

The object of this report is to consider which part of the world outside America presents the most favorable opportunities for anthropological investigation and the kind of inquiry from which the most valuable results may be anticipated. In considering these matters I propose to lay especial stress on a feature which serves to differentiate anthropology from other sciences, viz., the special urgency of its needs due to the character of its material. The importance of this distinction is so great that it may be dwelt upon for a moment. In the sciences dealing with inorganic matter and with living creatures other than man, the phenomena which form their subject-matter arc stable. The decision of a chemist whether he will use the present moment to attempt the synthesis of a substance is not influenced by the probability, much less the certainty, that in a few years the materials for the synthesis will have wholly disappeared. It is only in certain departments of systematic biology that there is any serious loss and change of the material with which science deals. With this exception the evidence now present will be equally available a hundred or a thousand years hence. This factor of urgency, wholly or almost without importance in other branches of science, is one from which the anthropologist can never escape, and it is of such vital importance that I have no hesitation in using it as my chief guide in this report.

The aim of anthropology is to teach us the history of mankind, of his physical structure, mind, social organization, language, morals, religion, and the useful and aesthetic arts. Taken in the widest sense, it would include history in so far as it can be studied through written records, but it is customary to limit the application of the term by reserving the study of such records as belonging to the domain of history in tho narrower sense and to restrict anthropology to the study of the evidence preserved in the unwritten records of the past and of the present - and the distinction of past and present forms the dividing line between the two chief departments of anthropology, viz., archæology and ethnology.

I begin by considering how these two chief departments of anthropology stand with respect to their urgency. It is only very exceptionally that the investigation of archaeological problems can be said to be urgent.

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