Ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology are interwoven with philology, jurisprudence, archaeology, geography, and the various branches of history. A fact may require to be investigated successively by linguists, anatomists, and mathematicians. In current language ethnography and ethnology are often used indiscriminately, but if a distinction is to be made between them, an instinctive perception teaches us to speak of ethnographic facts and ethnological theories, of ethnographic literature and ethnological science,— ethnology being related to ethnography as the wine to the grape.

II. Division.— Just as the lines which separate ethnology, anthropology, and history one from another are vaguely traced, so are the boundaries of* the several provinces of ethnology themselves indefinite We are obliged, for the sake of convenience, to draw up classifications, but the more rigorous we make them the more artificial they become. “Nature,” as Lamarck has said, “recognizee neither kingdoms, nor classes, nor orders, nor genera, nor sub-genera; nature recognizes nothing but individuals.” The older sciences may be tabulated to a degree which the younger sciences cannot allow, and ethnology is one of the youngest of all,—its existence, even its name, not dating further back than the present generation. Ethnologists are pioneers in a new field of inquiry,— squatters in the Far West of learning. Intent on opening the first paths through the dark forest of prehistoric times, on driving the first plough through these virgin prairies, they erect uo structures which pretend to more than a provisional character. They throw up now a log cabin, and now a wooden shanty, leaving to their successors the work of building substantial houses of brick, and in the far future stately edifices of enduring marble.

At first sight it might appear convenient to divide ethnology into two great branches :—(1) historic ethnology, comprising researches into the origin, the filiation, the customs and institutions of wild and barbarian tribes still existing, or of whom we have authentic records; (2) prehistoric ethnology, comprising similar researches into the early condition of man, but founded necessarily on deductions, and not on positive testimony. But the fitness and the simplicity of this division are more apparent than real. The two sections as thus indicated caunot be treated apart, because so few or incomplete are the vestiges of prehistoric man that they cannot furnish a basis for sound theories unless these remains are studied in the light of the knowledge which we possess of tribes existing in the non-civilized state, and who thus form the connecting link between historic and prehistoric man. Being a part of natural history, anthropology deah principally with the question of the several races, their anatomy, physiology, and pathology. It seeks to determine which are the permanent varieties, by the crania, by the facial features, by the stature and proportion of the body, by the miscroscopic structure of the hair, by the colour of the skin, ft analyses the great problems of evolution. It assigns to food, to climate, to what the French call the milieu, and the Americans “the surroundings,”—the share which each has had in producing or fostering the variations of human types. Ethnography does not discuss anew the solutions presented by anthropology, but accepts them as generally true, and observes if they fit and work satisfactorily in its department. The task, thus limited in order to secure its better execution, is still a gigantic one. Human development branches out into a multitude of ramifications, which may be brought under the following heads: [table]

III. Method.— Astronomy starts from the principle that the laws of mathematics and those of light and matter are universal,—that they are true not Only on the earth but throughout the universe. Ethnology takes its stand on the assumption that the laws of intelligence have always been what they are, and have always operated as they do now, that man has progressed from the simple to the complex, from the particular to the general. This assumption does not interfere with the discussion which the anthropologists carry on respecting monogeny or polygeny, —that is to say, the common or multiplex origin of the different races which inhabit the earth, nor does it affirm that the progress has been always continuous and well-marked. It recognizes the fact that some races may have been stationary and some may even have retrograded. It postulates simply that mankind, whatever be its origin, is, or has become, a mass practically homogeneous, more uniform than diverse The wide differences between civilized and uncivilized man are now admitted to be only differences in degree,—actual civilization being the adult age, and savagery the infancy of mankind. “The conditions and habits of existing savages,” says Sir John Lubbock, “resemble in many ways those of our own ancestors at a period now long gone by; they illustrate the earlier mental stages through which the human race has passed.” To the casual observer, savages seem to be, as to Dr Johnson, all alike, and in fact they are so in comparison with ourselves; but to the close observer who compares savages with savages, they are easily distinguishable. Although contemporaries, they are separated by differences in culture so great that it would seem the work of centuries for the more backward to attain the state already reached by the more advanced. Great, indeed, are the facilities which ethnology confers on the historian who may, for example, explain the condition of the Israelites under the Judges by that ot the Maories of New Zealand, as they were almost within the present generation, or may compare the earliest Aryan races with the Malay-Indian populations of to-day. By its aid the philosopher may trace an institution through all countries and in every period, accumulating illustrations of its progressive stages, and piecing them together in their natural sequence like the scattered bones of an extinct animal. Uncivilized countries are for us a standing exhibition of prehistoric matters, museums where we find duplicates of objects which were thought to be lost or which were forgotten; each of them is a Pompeii, exhumed from beneath the rubbish of ages. To study wild tribes is, as it were, to discover in the forests of Central America an ancient city, not crumbling and desolate, but still inhabited by a race preserving the old Maya habits and manners. The laying bare of all these scientific riches gave the impulse to which we owe ethnology. It does not require much reflection to understand that the principle just developed is an instance of the great law of evolution. According to the naturalist of the modern school, evolution has transformed successively the animal genera; according to the anthropologist, it has transformed the races of man; and, according to the ethnologist, it has transformed human thought. It must be confessed that evolution has yet opponents who contend that history records, not progress, but degeneration from a state of innocence and bliss, from an age of gold or Saturnian cycle. This doctrine, borne out by the unanimous testimony of all tradition, was assumed at one time to be beyond dispute, and had nearly become an article of faith. But in recent times it has not remained unchallenged. I·n answer to its assailants, the theory of degeneration has, within this century, been reasserted with great ingenuity and vehemence by ultramontane writers, such as De Maistre and De Bυnald, and in our own country it has been more recently defended by Whately with characteristic vigour. But an effective reply has been given by such writers as Lubbock and Tylor, especially the latter, who concludes an exhaustive discussion by these words, to which most ethnologists will subscribe :—

“We may fancy ourselves looking on civilization as in personal figure she traverses the world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often deviating into paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed by long ago; but, direct or devious, her path lies forward; and if now and then she tries a few backward steps, her walk soon falls into a helpless stumbling. It is not according to her nature; her feet were not made to plant uncertain steps behind her; for both in her forward view and in her onward gait she is of only human type.”— Early Culture, ii.

To the facts and reasonings adduced by the naturalists Mr Herbert Spencer adds the weight of speculative argument :—“Each organism, “he says,” exhibited within a short space of time a series of changes which, when supposed to occupy a period indefinitely great, and to go on in various ways instead of one way, gives us a tolerably clear conception of organic evolution in general. The whole exhibits one grand scheme of progression.” These words are the substance of the whole philosophy of evolution, which, sketched out by Maupertuis, Lamarck, and Goethe, reasserted and victoriously demonstrated by Darwin and Wallace, and taken up by Huxley, Virchow, Quatrefagee, Broca, and Haeckel, now underlies all ethnological research.

In the view of its supporters, evolution has not only in past ages differentiated genera and species, but is at work to-day in transforming the actual types. Here may be the place to advert to the great law, of which Von Baer and Agassiz were the most thorough and successful exponents, namely, “that the development of the individual is an epitome of that of the species.” The human embryo, for example, passes rapidly through all the principal phases, in one or other of which whole series of inferior animals stay permanently, in such a manner that every new generation repeats in an abridged manner those that have gone before. Of the many corollaries which follow from this theory, the most important seems to be that, however much some groups of animals may differ from each other in structure and habits, they must have descended from the same parent form, if they are found to pass through similar embryonic stages. This is heredity. Ethnologists, again, have not been slow in borrowing this law from anatomists. The embryo going over the same organic form as the species, they argue that the child too must repeat the intellectual developments of past mankind. Parents, and not only the observers among them, had already reversed the opinion of the philosophers that savages are children by saying that children are savages. The remarkable similarity between their ideas, language, habits, and character, though generally admitted, had been regarded merely as a curious accident; but coincidences of such vast magnitude are not to be considered as merely accidental. Everybody know⅛ and the fact is as important as it is obvious, how boys delight in romping, running, leaping, boating, swimming, and all out-door exercises, and how their favourite heroes are the Red Rover, Robin Hood in the forest green, Robinson Crusoe in the solitude of his island home, where he had to begin all anew.

Peculiar instances of the general law of inheritance have been called atavism. It occurs often that one individual is the exact countertype of his grandfather, or some more remote ancestor. By this law, still a very obscure one, ethnologists explain how men are occasionally met with who live in the midst of our civilization as mere savages. The passion manifested by many people for hunting and fishing as a sport, for a tramping roving life, the frequent falling or relapse of French settlers in Canada (the Bois brûlés) into Indian habits, are supposed to be manifestations of atavism. But our stiff and rigid civilization is averse to those old fashioned individuals, who roam about, living from hand to mouth; the existing system of law can scarcely be brought to distinguish them from criminals. Moralists attribute to atavism a large number of offences which lawyers attribute to guilty dispositions. Now-a-days more than one Boadicea emerges into a brief celebrity upon being sentenced to hard labour in the house of correction; more than one Cassivellaunus has been severely flogged and sent to penal servitude. Mr Dugdale, an industrious statistician of New York, has traced to its common ancestor a family, the Jukes, consisting of 1200 people, of which the majority are paupers, thieves, or prostitutes, in a greater or less degree, and who are computed to have cost the state in prison maintenance, almshouse relief, <fcc., something like £260,000. The ancestor was a descendant of the early Dutch settlers, and lived much as backwoodsmen do now upon the Indian frontiers. He is described as a “hunter and fisherman, a hard drinker, jovial and companionable, averse to steady toil, working hard by spells and idling by turns, becoming blind in his old age, and his blindness has been entailed upon his children and grandchildren.”

It is not, however, owing to atavism, but to the mere continuance of an old order of things, that so many of our ill-educated classes, shepherds, agricultural labourers, and even factory hands, are as little developed, and live a life as little intellectual as savages. Latent in our small hamlets and large cities there is more savagery than many reformers are aware of, and it needs but little experience to discover something of the old barbarity lurking still in minds and hearts under a thin veil of civilization.

Atavism is a word applied to persons; survival, an expressive word for which we are indebted to Tylor, has a similar meaning, but is applied to things. Survivals are habits, ideas, or expressions which are senseless and perfectly inexplicable by the light of our present modes of life and thought, but can be explained by reference to similar customs or prejudices which are still to be found among distant tribes, or which are mentioned by ancient writers. The word survival corresponds exactly to the Latin word superstition, meaning the remainder or residue of bygone ages. But as the use of the word superstition is practically restricted to matters pertaining to religion and magic, a more general word had to be coined. “Survivals,” says Tylor, “are milestones on the way of culture.” They are intellectual fossils. Just as spear heads and fragments of ancient pottery are disinterred by the plough in the midst of our fields, so survivals may be picked out in our daily conversation, in our habits and manners, but it requires a trained intelligence to detect them. Their original meaning has been lost, and they have been modified and distorted to serve modem purposes. Survivals may be compared to those muscles or pieces of bone which are retained in the bodies of animals and even in the human frame, as relics of a former construction. But sooner or later they will fall to the ground. Nature closely husbands her means; she may keep for a while forms that are apparently useless; it seems that she has forgotten them, or that she intends to fall back on them in case of failure; but when the new type is firmly settled, everything that is not· serviceable disappears.

The scientific exploration of caverns with a view to discovering the remains of ancient men and beasts, as Pengelly has described it in the case of the Kent Cave, may serve as a model to ethnographers. The explorers did not leave an inch of soil untouched; all the mound was dug out yard by yard, and carefully sifted; nothing was taken up, nothing thrown away without good reason; the objects collected were labelled with care, and even the nature and the condition of the refuse recorded. So the main work of the ethnographer consists in scooping the historic or the prehistoric soil, in picking up everything that has lived, or that has been touched by living hands, and not rejecting as valueless anything as long as he is not perfectly cognizant of its nature. Thus he finds precious things and valuable information where the ignorant seesbut heaps of offal and scourings. And when he travels, especially in semi-civilized countries, there is no limit to the things he may look aud inquire after; the less the people are civilized, the richer the harvest he may gather in. One investigator prefers to study the people themselves, another their institutions. But whatever be the study, the first rule will always be to observe the facts with unprejudiced eyes; to draw a deep line of demarcation between them and all mere conjectures. Besides, all explanations have to be called in question, even those which seem sensible and judicious; the student is in duty 7 bound to distrust every theor, and interpretation, especially his own glosses and commentaries. Rushing to conclusions is a fault into which beginners are sure to fall. The unscientific mind resembles the child in many respects, and in none more than this; it is impatient and cannot bear suspense. Ready acquiescence in the assertion of others is dangerous, and easy conviction in one’s own ideas is the worst bane to science.

One single fact well observed, well authenticated, is a positive gain, and may turn out to be of the highest value in future studies. But a single fact proves too much or too little; as long as it stands alone, nobody can know whether it demonstrates a general law, or only an exception, as we see by the controversies still held on the famous skull of Neanderthal. Laws are obtained by grouping analogous facts in series. In nature, as in history, a series may be termed the development of an idea. Therefore, when the ethnographer does not restrict himself to the simple description of a single subject, of a single locality, of a single custom, he will have to search for analogous facts, that he may give the reader a scale of comparison. For he would expose himself and his readers to gross errors if he were to conclude from a single trait to the whole institution, or from a single institution to the whole national organization. Such primitive populations as the Aleutians or the Todas it would be easy to represent as living either in a moral paradise or in a moral hell, according as one chose to regard only the attractive or only the repulsive side of their character. A fine ethnographical portrait, which is an abstract representation, will be always difficult to draw. In the sketch of that collective individual, a nation, the features must be impressed with the many lines and furrows which the wear and tear of existence have left on the original. In describing an institution which is a collective fact, the numerous and contradictory feelings must be indicated yhich it stirred up in the many mindsand hearts on which it acted, and which reacted on it. But masters only know how to blend light and shade—how with some few colours to express a multitude of things.

Ethnology, having entered on the scientific stage of development, requires to be treated as a science. The fields of anthropology and ethnology are no longer the tilting-yard for fancies against opinions, for hypotheses against guesses; they are now the place where facts well authenticated are stored up and gathered into orderly groups. Ethnology has become a science of observation, a branch of natural history. It was born the last of all sciences, not because it is the most difficult, but, on the contrary, because, being easy enough, people have dealt with it too lightly. Everybody thought himself able to judge, and his sentences expressed his biases or dislikes. Now, ethnology requires of its adepts that they be as unprejudiced as mathematicians, that they discard all preconceived ju⅛lg ments as much as do the chemists and physicists. Ethnographers...