The scope of social anthropology; a lecture delivered before the University of Liverpool, May 14th, 1908

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SCOPE OF SOCIAL
ANTVIROPOLOGY

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

"f The Scope of
Social Anthropology

A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE
1 HE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, MAY 14TH, 1908

•A

BY

J. G. FRAZER, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1908

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The Scope of
Social Anthropology

A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE
THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, MAY 14TH, 1908

BY

J. G. FRAZER, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1908

THE SCOPE OF
SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The subject of the chair which I have the honour
to hold is Social Anthropology. As the subject is
still comparatively new and its limits are still somewhat
vague, I shall devote my inaugural lecture to defining
its scope and marking out roughly, if not the bound-
aries of the whole study, at least the boundaries of that
part of it which I propose to take for my province.

Strange as it may seem, in the large and thriving
family of the sciences. Anthropology, or the Science of
Man, is the latest born. So young indeed is the study
that three of its distinguished founders in England, Pro-
fessor E. B. Tylor, Lord Avebury, and Mr. Francis
Galton, are happily still with us. It is true that parti-
cular departments of man's complex nature have long
been the theme of special studies. Anatomy has investi-
gated his body, psychology has explored his mind,
theology and metaphysics have sought to plumb the
depths of the great mysteries by which he is encompassed
on every hand. But it has been reserved for the present
generation, or rather for the generation which is passing
away, to attempt the comprehensive study of man as a
whole, to enquire not merely into the physical .and mental
structure ofthe individual, but to compare the. various
races of men, to trace their affinities, and by means of a
wide collection of facts to follow as far as may be the

G90(yl7

4 THE SCOPE OF

evolution of 4iumatt-tiought and institutions from the
earliest times. The aim of this, as of every other science,
is to discover the general laws to which the particular
facts may be supposed to conform. I say, may be
supposed to conform, because research in all depart-
ments has rendered it antecedently probable that every-
where law and order will be found to prevail if we
search for them diligently, and that accordingly the
affairs of man, however complex and incalculable they
may seem to be, are no exception to the uniformity of
nature. Anthropology, therefore, in the widest sense of
the word, aims at discovering the general laws which
have regulated hunian history in the past, and which,
if nature is really uniforni, may be expected to regulate
it in the future.

Hence the science of man coincides to a certain
extent with what has long been known as the philo-
sophy of history as well as with the study to which
of late years the name of Sociology has been given.
Indeed it might with some reason be held that Social
Anthropologv, or the study of man in society, is only
another expression for Sociology. Yet I think that the
two sciences may be conveniently distinguished, and
that while the name of Sociology should be reserved for
the study of human society in the most comprehensive
sense of the words, the name of Social Anthropology
may with advantage be restricted to'~one~ particular
department"of ~ tllat tmmeTise field of knowledge. At
least I wish to make it perfectly clear at the outset that
I for one do not pretend to treat of the whole of
human society, past, present, and future. Whether
any single man's compass of mind and range of learning
suffice for such a vast undertaking, I will not venture
to say, but I do say without hesitation or ambiguity
that mine certainly do not. I can only speak of what
I have studied, and my studies have been mostly
confined to a small, a very small part of man's social
history. That part is the origin, or rather the^rudi-

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 5

mentary phases, the infancy and childhood, of human
society, and taxhat part,accordingly_I_ propose Jo limit
the scope of Social Anthropology^^ or at aIT_evetits my
treatment of it. My successors in the chair will be free
to extend their purview beyond the narrow boundaries
which the limitation of my knowledge imposes on me.
They may survey the latest developments as well as the
earliest beginnings of custom and law, of science and
art, of morality atid religion, and from that survey they
may deduce the principles which shoukL-guide— man-
kind in the future, so that those who come after us
may avoid the snares and pitfalls into whicH~we and
our fathers have slipped. For the best^truit of
knowledge is wisdom, and it may reasonably be hoped c
that a deeper and wider acquaintance with the past
history of mankind will in time enable our statesmen
to mould the destiny of the race in fairer forms than we
of this generation shall live to see.

Ah Love ! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire.

Would we not shatter it to bits — and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's desire !

But if you wish to shatter the social fabric, you must
not expect your professor of Social Anthropology to
aid and abet you. He is no seer to discern, no prophet
to foretell a coming heaven on earth, no mountebank
with a sovran remedy for every ill, no Red Cross
Knight to head a crusade against misery and want, /
against disease and death, against all the horrid spectres
that war on poor humanity. It is for others with
higher notes and nobler natures than his to sound the
charge and lead it in this Holy War. He is only
a student, a student of the past, who may4)er'haps tell
you a little, a very little, of what has been, but who
cannot, dare not tell yoiL-what ought to be. Yet even
the little that he can contribute to the elucidation of
the past may hav^its trtiltty-as well -as^its-iaterest when

6 THE SCOPE OF

it finally takes its place in that great temple of science
to which it is the ambition of every student to add a
stone. For we cherish a belief that if we truly love
and seek knowledge for its own sake, without any
ulterior aim, every addition we may make to it, how-
ever insignificant and useless it may appear, will yet at
last be found to work together with the whole accumu-
lated store for the general good of mankind.

Thus the sphere of Social Anthropology as I under-
stand it, or at least as I propose_to_treat it, is limited
to the crude beginnings, the rudimentary development
of human •society : it does not include the maturer
phases of that complex growth, still less does it embrace
the practical problems with which our modern statesmen
and lawgivers are called upon to deal. The study
might accordingly be described as the embryology of
human thought and institutions, or, to be more precise,
as that enquiry which seeks to ascertain, first, the beliefs
and customs of savages, and, second, the relics of these
beliefs and customs which have survived like fossils
among peoples of higher culture. In this description
of the sphere of Social Anthropology it^is implied that
the ancestors of the civilised nations were once savages,
and that they have transmitted, or may have transmitted,
to their more cultured descendants ideas and institutions
which, however incongruous with their later surround-
ings, were perfectly in keeping with the modes of
thought and action of the ruder society in which they
originated. In short, the definition assumes that
civilisation has always and everywhere been evolved out
of savagery. The mass of evidence on .which this
assumption~>ests is in my opinion so great as to render
the induction incontrovertible. At least, if any one
disputes it Ido not think it worth while to argue with
him. There are still, I believe, in civilised society
people who hold that the earth is flat and that the sun
goes round it ; but no sensible man will waste time in
the vain attempt to convince such persons of their error.

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 7

even though these flatteners of the earth and circulators
of the sun appeal with perfect justice to the evidence of
their senses in support of their hallucination, which is
more than the opponents of man's primitive savagery
are able to do.

Thus the study of savage life^ is a very important
part of Social Anthropology. For by comparison
with civilised man the savage represents an arrested or
rather retarded stage of social development, and an
examination of his customs arid beliefs accordingly
supplies the same sort of evidence of the evolution of
the human mind that an examination of the embrvo
supplies of the evolution of the human ^ody. To put
it otherwise, a savage is to a civilised man as a child
is to an adult ; and just as the gradual growth of
intelligence in a child corresponds to, and in a sense
recapitulates, the gradual growth of intelligence in the
species, so a study of savage society at various stages of
evolution enables us to follow approximately, though
of course not exactly, the road by which the ancestors
of the higher races must have travelled in their progress
upward through barbarism to civilisation. In_s_hort,
savagery is the primitive condition of mankind, and if
^we would understand what primitive man was we must
'know„wh.at the savage now is.

But here it is necessary to guard against a common
misapprehension. The savages of to-day are primitive
only in a relative, not in an absolute sense. They are
primitive by comparison with us ; but they are not
primitive by comparison with truly primaeval man, that
is, with man as he was when he first emerged from the
purely bestial stage of existence. Indeed, compared with
man in his absolutely pristine state even the lowest savage
of to-day is doubtless a highly developed and cultured
being, since all evidence and all probability are in favour
of the view that every existing race of men, the rudest as
well as the most civilised, has reached its present level ot
culture, whether it be high or low, only after a slow

8 THE SCOPE OF

and painful progress upwards, which must have ex-
tended over many thousands, perhaps milHons, of years.
Therefore when we speak of any known savages as
primitive, which the usage of the English language
permits us to do, it should always be remembered that
we apply the term -primitive to them in a relative, not
in an absolute -seiise. What we mean is that their
culture is rudimentary compared with that of the
civilised nations, but not by any means that it is
identical with that of primaeval man. It is necessary
to emphasise this relative use of the term primitive in
its application to all known savages without exception,
because the ambiguity arising from the double meaning
of the word has been the source of much confusion and
misunderstanding. Careless or unscrupulous writers
have made great play with it for purposes of con-
troversy, using the word now in the one sense and now
in the other as it suited their argument at the moment,
without perceiving, or at all events without indicating,
the equivocation. In order to avoid these verbal
fallacies it is only necessary to bear steadily in mind
that while Social Anthropology has much to say of
primitive man in the relative sense, it has nothing
whatever to say about primitive man in the absolute
sense, and that for the very simple reason that it knows
nothing whatever about him, and, so far as we can see at
present, is never likely: -to^know_A'"'y thing. To con-
struct a history of human society by starting from
absolutely primordial man and working down through
thousands or millions of years to the institutions of
existing savages might possibly have merits as a flight
of imagination, but it could have none as a work of
science. To do this would be exactly to reverse the
proper mode of scientific procedure. It would be to
work a -priori from the unknown to the known instead
of a posteriori from the known to the unknown. ^_For
we do know a good deal about the social state of the
savages of to-day and yesterday, but we know nothing

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 9

whatever, I repeat, about absolutely primitive human
sociej:^. Hence a sober enquirer who seeks to elucidate
the social evolution of mankind in ages before the dawn
of history must start, not . frpm an unknown and purely
.hypothetical primaeval man, but from the lowest savages
whom we know or possess adequate records-of ; and
from their customs, beliefs, and traditions as a solid
basis of fact he may work back a little way hypothetic-
ally through the obscurity of the past ; that is, he may
form a reasonable theory of the way in wHTch these
actual customs, beliefs, and traditions have grown up
and developed in a period more or less remote, but
probably not very remote, from the one in which they
have been observed and recorded. But if, as I assume,
he is a sober enquirer, he will never expect to carry
back this reconstruction of human history very far, still
less will he dream of linking it up with the very
beginning, because he is aware that we possess no
evidence which would enable us to bridge even hypo-
thetically the gulf of thousands or millions of years
which divides the savage of , tg:::_day_ from primaeval
— man. -^

It may be well to illustrate my meaning by an
example. The matrimonial customs and modes of
tracing relationships which prevail among some savage
races, and even among peoples at a higher stage of
culture, furnish very strong grounds for believing that
the systems of marriage and consanguinity which are
now in vogue among civilised peoples must have been
immediately preceded at a more or less distant time by
very different modes of counting kin and regulating
marriage ; in fact, that monogamy and the forbidden
degrees of kinship have replaced an older system of
much wider and looser sexual relations. But to say this
is not to affirm that such looser and wider relations were
characteristic of the absolutely primitive condition
of mankind ; it is only to say that actually existing
customs and traditions clearly indicate the extensive

u-

lo THE SCOPE OF

prevalence of such relations at some former time in the
history of our race. How remote that time was, we
cannot tell ; but, estimated by the whole vast period of
man's existence on earth, it seems probable that the
era of sexual communism to which the evidence points
was comparatively recent ; in other words, that for the
civilised races the interval which divides that era from
our own is to be reckoned by thousands rather than by
hundreds of thousands of years, while for the lowest of
existing savages, for example, the aborigines of Australia,
it is possible or probable that the interval may not be
greater than a few centuries. Be that as it may, even
if on the strength of the evidence I have referred to we
could demonstrate the former prevalence of a system of
sexual communism among all the races of mankind, this
would only carry us back a single step in the long
history of our species ; it would not justify us in
concluding that such a system had been practised by
truly primasval man, still less that it had prevailed
among mankind from the beginning down to the
comparatively recent period at which its existence may
be inferred from the evidence at our disposal. About the
social condition of primasval man, I repeat, we know
absolutely nothing, and it is vain to speculate. Our
first parents may have been as strict monogamists as
Whiston or Dr. Primrose, or they may have been just
the reverse. We have no information on the subject,
and are never likely to get any. In the countless ages
which have elapsed since man and woman first roamed
the happy garden hand in hand or jabbered like apes
among the leafy boughs of the virgin forest, their
relations to each other may have undergone innumerable
changes. For human affairs, like the courses of the
heaven, seem to run in cycles : the social pendulum
swings to and fro from one extremity of the scale to
the other : in the political sphere it has swung from
democracy to despotism, and back again from despotism
to democracy ; and so in the domestic sphere it may

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY u

have oscillated many a time between libertinism and
monogamy.

If I am right in my definition of Social Anthropology,

its province may be roughly divided into two depart-

, ments, one of which embraces the customs and beliefs

.— of savages, while the other includes such relics of these
customs and-ieliefs as-have survived in the thought
and institutions of more cultured peoples. The one
department may be called the study of savagery, the ^

other the study of folklore. I have said something i
of savagery : I now turn to folklore, that is, to the
survivals of more primitive ideas and practices among
peoples who in other respects have risen to a higher
plane of culture. That such survivals may be dis-
covered in every civilised nation will hardly now be
disputed by anybody. When we read, for example, of
an Irishwoman roasted to death by her husband on a
suspicion that she was not his wife but a fairy changeling,^
or again, of an Englishwoman dying of lockjaw because
she had anointed the nail that wounded her instead of
the wound," we may be sure that the beliefs to which
these poor creatures fell victims were not learned by
them in school or at church, but had been transmitted
from truly savage ancestors through many generations
of outwardly though not really civilised descendants.
Beliefs and practices of this sort are therefore rightly
called superstitions, which means literally survivals. It
is with superstitions in the strict sense of the word
that the second department of Social Anthropology is
concerned.

If we ask how it happens that superstitions

X linger among a people who in general have reached

a higher level of culture, the answer is to be found ) y
m the natural, universal, and ineradicable inequality ^

^ This happened at BallyvacUea, in the county of Tipperary, in March 1895.
For details of the evidence given at the trial of the murderers, see "The 'Witch-
burning' at Clonmel," Folk-lore, vi. (1895) pp. 373-384.

- This happened at Norwich in June 1902. See The People's Weekly Journal
for Norfolk, July 19, 1902, p. 8.

12 THE SCOPE OF

nf men. Not only are different races differently
endowed in respect of intelligence, courage, industry,
/ and so forth, but within the same nation men of
the same generation differ enormously in inborn
"j capacity and worth. No abstract doctjnne is more ,
1 false and mischievous than that of tFe natural equality
lof men. It is true that the legislator must treat men
as"ifthey were equal, because laws of necessity are
general and cannot be made so as to fit the infinite
variety of individual cases. But we must not imagine
that because men are equal before the law they are
therefore intrinsically equal to each other. The ex-
perience of common life sufficiently contradicts such a
vain imagination. At school and at the universities,
at work and at play, in peace and in war, the mental
and moral inequalities of human beings stand out too
conspicuously to be ignored or disputed. On the whole
the men of keenest intelligence and strongest characters
lead the rest and shape the moulds into which, out-
wardly at least, society is cast. As such men are
necessarily -few - by comparison with the multitude
whom they lead, it follows that the community is really
dominated by the will of an enlightened minority ^ even
in countries where the ruling power is nominally vested
in the hands of the numerical majority. In fact,
disguise it as we may, the government of mankind is
always and everywhere essentially aristocratic. No
juggling with political machinery can evade this law of
nature. However it may seem to lead, the dull-witted
majority in the end follows a keener-witted minority.
That is its salvation and the secret of progress. The
higher human intelligence sways the 4ower, j ust as^the
intelligence of man gives him the mastery over the
brutesu_ I do notjmean that the ultimate direction of
society rests with its nominal governors, with its kings,

' I sny "<3« enlightened minority," because in any large community there are
always many minorities, and some of them are very far from enlightened. It is
possible to be below as well as above the average level of our fellows.

^

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 13

its statesmen, its legislators. The true rulers of men
are the thinkers who advance knowledge ; for just as
it is through his superior knowledge, not through his
superior strength, that man bears rule over the rest of
the animal creation, so among men themselves it is
knowledge which in the long run directs and controls the
forces of society. Thus the discoverers of new truths
are the real though uncrowned and unsceptred kings
of mankind ; monarchs, statesmen, and law-givers are
but their ministers, who sooner or later do their bidding
by carrying out the ideas of these master minds.
The more we study the inward workings of society
and the progress of civilisation, the more clearly
shall we perceive how both are governed by the
influence of thoughts which, springing up at first we
know not how or whence in a few superior minds,
gradually spread till they have leavened the whole inert
lump of a community or of mankind. The origin of
such mental variations, with all their far-reaching train
of social consequences, is just as obscure as is the origin
of those physical variations on which, if biologists are
right, depends the evolution of species, and with it the
possibility of progress. Perhaps the 'same unknown
cause which determines the one set of variations gives
rise to the other also. We cannot tell. All we can
say is that on the whole in the conflict of competing
forces, whether physical or mental, the strongest at last
prevails, the fittest survives. In the mental sphere the
struggle for existence is not less fierce and internecine
than in the physical, but in the end the better ideas,
which we call the truth, carry the day. The clamorous
opposition with which at their first appearance they are
regularly greeted whenever they conflict with old
prejudices may retard but cannot prevent their final
victory. It is the practice of the mob first to stone
and then to erect useless memorials to their greatest
benefactors. All who set themselves to replace ancient
error and superstition by truth and reason must lay

14 THE SCOPE OF

their account with brickbats in their Hfe and a marble
monument after death.
r' I have been led into making these remarks by the
TY wish to explain why it is that superstitions of all sorts,
V^political, moral, and religious, survive among peoples
who have the opportunity of knowing better. The
reason is that the better ideas, which ^ are constantly
forming ffP the~"upper stratum, have not yet filtered
through from the highest to the lowest minds. Such
a filtration is generally slow, and by the time that the
new notions have penetrated to the bottom, ifjjjdeed
they ever get there, they are often already .obsolete and
superseded by others at the top. Hence it is that if
we could open the heads and read the thoughts of two
men of the same generation and country but at opposite
ends of the intellectual scale, we should probably find
their minds as different as if the two belonged to
different species. Mankind, as it has been well said,
advances in echelons ; that is, the columns march not
abreast of each other but in a straggling line, all
lagging in various degrees behind the ' leader. The
image well" describes the difference not only between
peoples, but between individuals of the same people
and the same generation. Just as one nation is
continually outstripping some of its contemporaries,
so within the same nation some men are constantly
outpacing their fellows, and the foremost in the
race are those who have thrown off the load of super-
stition which still burdens the backs and clogs the
footsteps of the laggards. To drop metaphor, supersti-
tions survive because, while they shock the views of
enlightened members of the community, they are still
in harmony with the thoughts and feelings of others
who, though they are drilled by their betters into an
appearance of civilisation, remain barbarians or savages
at heart.. That is why, for exan-iple, the barbarous

piini'^hmenfsfnr high t;reaqnn_a-mi jvifrhrraff and the

enormities oT^lavcrv were tolerated and defended in

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 15

this country down to modern times. Such survivals
may be divided into two sorts, according as they are
public or private ; in other words, according as they
are embodied in the law of the land or are practised
with or without the connivance of the law in holes and
corners. The examples I have just cited belong to the
former of these two classes. Witches were publicly
burned and traitors were publicly disembowelled in
England not so long ago, and slavery survived as a
legal institution still later. The true nature of such
public superstitions is apt, through their very publicity,
to escape detection, because until they are finally swept
away by the rising tide of progress, there are always
plenty of people to defend them as institutions essential
to the public welfare and sanctioned by the laws of God
and man.

It is otherwise with those private superstitions to
which the name of folklore is usually confined. In
civilised society most educated people are not even
aware of the extent to which these relics of savage
ignorance survive at their doors. The discovery of
their wide prevalence was indeed only made last
century, chiefly through the researches of the brothers
Grimm in Germany. Since their day systematic enquiries
carried on among the less educated classes, and especially
among the peasantry, of Europe have revealed the
astonishing, nay, alarming truth that a mass, if not
the majority, of people in every civilised country is
still living in a state of intellectual savagery, that, in
fact, the smooth surface of cultured society is sapped
and mined by superstition. Only those whose studies
have led them to investigate the subject are aware of
the depth to which the ground beneath our feet is thus
as it were honeycombed by unseen forces. We appear
to be standing on a volcano which may at any moment
break out in smoke and fire to spread ruin and devasta-
tion among the gardens and palaces of ancient culture
wrought so laboriously by the hands of many genera-

1 6 THE SCOPE OF

tions. After looking on the ruined Greek temples of
Paestum and contrasting them with the squalor and
savagery of the Italian peasantry, Renan said, " I
trembled for civilisation, seeing it so limited, built on
so weak a foundation, resting on so few individuals
even in the country where it is dominant." •*

If we examine the superstitious beliefs which are
tacitly but firmly held by many of our fellow-country-
men, we shall find, perhaps to our surprise, that it is
precisely the oldest and crudest superstitions which are
most tenacious of life, while views which, though also
erroneous, are more modern and refined, soon fade from
.the popular memory. For example, the high gods of
Egypt and Babylon, of Greece and Rome, have for
ages been totally forgotten by the people and survive
only in the books of the learned ; yet the peasants, who
never even heard of Isis and Osiris, of Apollo and
Artemis, of Jupiter and Juno, retain to this day a firm
belief in witches and fairies, in ghosts and hobgoblins,
those lesser creatures of the mythical fancy in which
their fathers believed long before the great deities of the
ancient world were ever thought of, and in which, to
all appearance, their descendants will continue to believe
long after the great deities of the present day shall have
gone the way of all their predecessors. The reason
why the higher forms of superstition or religion (for
the religion of one generation is apt to become the
superstition of the next) are less permanent than the
lower is simply that the higher beliefs, being a creation
of superior intelligence, have little hold on the minds of
the vulgar, who nominally profess them for a time in
conformity with the will of their betters, but readily
shed and forget them as soon as these beliefs have gone
out of fashion with the educated classes. But while
they dismiss without a pang or an effort articles of faith
which were only superficially imprinted on their minds
by the weight of cultured opinion, the ignorant and

^ E. Renan et M. Berthelot, Correspondance (Paris, 1898), pp. 75 iq.

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 17

foolish multitude cling with a sullen determination to
far grosser beliefs which really answer to the coarser
texture of their undeveloped intellect. ^Pkns'while the
avowed creed of the enlightened minority: is constantly
changing^under the influence of reflection_and enquiry,
the real, though unavowed, creed o£ the mas§^of man-
kind appears to be almost stationary, and„the-reason
why it alters so little is that in the majority of
men, whether they are savages or outwardly civilised
beings, intellectual progress is so slow as to be hardly
perceptible.

Thus from an examination, first, of savagery and,
second, of its survivals in civilisation, the study of Social
Anthropology attempts to trace the early history of
human thought and institutions. The history can never
be complete, unless indeed science should discover some
mode of reading the faded record of the past of which
we in this generation can hardly dream. Wd know
indeed that every event, however insignificant, implies a
change, however slight, in the material constitution of
the universe, so that the whole history of the world is,
in a sense, engraved upon its face, though our eyes are
too dim to read the scroll. It may be that in the
future some wondrous reagent, some magic chemical,
may yet be found to bring out the whole of nature's
secret handwriting for a greater than Daniel to interpret
to his fellows. That will hardly be in our time. With
the resources at present at our command we must be
content with a very brief, imperfect, and in large measure
conjectural account of man's mental and social develop-
ment in prehistoric ages. As I have already pointed
out, the evidence, fragmentary and dubious as it is, only
runs back a very little ^yay into the measureless past of
human life on earth ; we soon lose the thread, the faintly
glimmering thread, in the thick darkness of the abso-
lutely unknown. Even in the comparatively short
space of time, a few thousand years at most, which falls
more or less within our ken, there are many deep and

1 8 THE SCOPE OF

wide chasms which can only be bridged by hypotheses,
if the story of evolution is to run continuously. Such
bridges are built in anthropology as in biology by -the
/ Comparative Method, which enables us to borrow the links
of one chain of evidence to supply the gaps in another.
For us who deal, not with the various forms of animal
life, but with the various products of human intelligence,
the legitimacy of the Comparative Method rests on the
well-ascertained similarity of the working of the human
mind in all races of men. I have laid stress on the great
inequalities which exist not only between the various
races, but between men of the same race and generation ;
but it should be clearly understood and remembered
that these divergencies are quantitative rather than
qualitative, they consist in differences of degree rather
than of kind. The savage is not a different sort of
being from his civilised brother : he has the same
capacities, mental and moral, but they are less fully
developed : his evolution has been arrested, or rather
retarded, at a lower level. And as savage races are
not all on the same plane, but have stopped or tarried
at different points of the upward path, we can to a
certain extent, by comparing them with each other,
construct a scale of social progression and mark out
roughly some of the stages on the long road that leads
from savagery to civilisation. In the kingdom of mind
such a scale of mental evolution answers to the scale of
morphological evolution in the animal kingdom.

From what I have said I hope you have formed some
idea of the extreme importance which the study of savage
life possesses for a proper understanding of the early
history of mankind. The savage is a human document,
\l a record of man's efforts to raise himself above the level
of the beast. It is only of late years that the full value
of the document has been appreciated ; indeed, many
people are probably still of Dr. Johnson's opinion, who,
pointing to the three large volumes of Voyages to the
South Seas which had just come out, said : " Who will

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 19

read them through ? A man had better work his way
before the mast than read them through ; they will be
eaten by rats and mice before they are read through.
There can be little entertainment in such books ; one
set of savages is like another." ^ But the world has
learned a good deal since Dr. Johnson's day ; and the
records of savage life, which the sage of Bolt Court
consigned witholit scruple to the rats and mice, have
now their place among the most precious archives of
humanity. Their fate has been like that of the
Sibylline Books. They were neglected and despised
when they might have been obtained complete ; and
now wise men would give more than a king's ransom
for their miserably mutilated and imperfect remains.
It is true that before our time civilised men often viewed
savages with interest and described them intelligently,
and some of their descriptions are still of great scientific
value. For example, the discovery of America naturally
excited in the minds of the European peoples an eager
curiosity as to the inhabitants of the new world, which
had burst upon their gaze, as if at the waving of a
wizard's wand the curtain of the western sky had
suddenly rolled up and disclosed scenes of glamour and
enchantment. Accordingly some of the Spaniards who
explored and conquered these realms of wonder have
bequeathed to us accounts of the manners and customs
of the Indians, which for accuracy and fulness of detail
probably surpass any former records of an alien race.
Such, for instance, is the great work of the Franciscan
friar Sahagun on the natives of Mexico, and such the
work of Garcilasso de la Vega, himself half an Inca, on
the Incas of Peru. Again, the exploration of the
Pacific in the eighteenth century, with its revelation of
fairy-like islands scattered in profusion over a sea of
eternal summer, drew the eyes and stirred the imagina-
tion of Europe ; and to the curiosity thus raised in
many minds, though not in Dr. Johnson's, we owe

■* J. Bosvvell, Life of Samuel Johnson^ (London, 1822), iv. 315.

20 THE SCOPE OF

some precious descriptions of the islanders, who, in
those days of sailing ships, appeared to dwell so remote
from us that the poet Cowper fancied their seas might
never again be ploughed by English keels. -^

These and many other old accounts of savages must
always retain their interest and value for the study of
Social Anthropology, all the more because they set
before us the natives in their natural unsophisticated
state, before their primitive manners and customs had
been altered or destroyed by European influence.
Yet in the light of subsequent research these early
records are often seen to be very defective, because
the authors, unaware of the scientific importance of
facts which to the ordinary observer might appear
trifling or disgusting, have either passed over many
things of the highest interest in total silence or dis-
missed them with a brief and tantalising allusion.
It is accordingly necessary to supplement the reports
%f former writers by a minute and painstaking in-
vestigation of the living savages in order to fill up, if
possible, the many yawning gaps in our knowledge.
Unfortunately this cannot always be done, since many
savages have either been totally exterminated or so
changed by contact with Europeans that it is no longer
possible to obtain trustworthy information as to their
old habits and traditions. But whenever the ancient
customs and beliefs of a primitive race have passed
away unrecorded, a document of human history has
perished beyond recall. Unhappily this destruction of
the archives, as we may call it, is going on apace. In
some places, for example, in Tasmania, the savage is
already extinct ; in others, as in Australia, he is dying.
In others again, for instance in Central and Southern
Africa, where the numbers and inborn vigour of the
race shew little or no sign of succumbing in the

1 /'/ />oui!(i/fss oceans, never to be passed
By nux/igators umnform'J as they.
Or plough'' d perhaps by British bark again.

The Task, book i. 629 sqq.

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 21

struggle for existence, the influence of traders, officials,
and missionaries is so rapidly disintegrating and
effacing the native customs, that with the passing of the
older generation even the memory of them will soon in
many places be gone. It is therefore a matter of the
most urgent- scientific importance to secure without
delay full_and accurate reports of these perishing or
changing peoples, to take permanent copies, so to say,
of these precious monuments before they are destroyed.
It is not yet_too late. Much may still be learned, for
example, in West Australia, in New Guinea, in Melanesia,
in Central Africa, among the hill tribes of India and the
forest Indians of the Amazons. There is still time to
send expeditions to these regions, to subsidise men on
the spot, who are conversant with the languages and
enjoy the confidence of the natives ; for there are such
men who possess or can obtain the very knowledge we
require, yet who, unaware or careless of its inestimable
value for science, make no effort to preserve the
treasure for posterity, and, if we do not speedily come
to the rescue, will suffer it to perish with them. In the
whole range of human knowledge at- the present
moment there is no more pressing need than that of ;

recording this priceless evidence of man's early history
before it is too late. For soon, very soon, the oppor- jf

tunities which we still enjoy will be gone for ever. In / y'
another quarter of a century probably there will be |^:: y

little or nothing of the old savage life left to record.
The savage, such as we may still see him, will then be (-^
as extinct as the dodo. The sands are fast running
out : the hour will soon strike : the record will be
closed : the book will be sealed. And how shall we
of this generation look when we stand at the bar of
posterity arraigned on a charge of high treason to our \

race, we who neglected to study our perishing fellow-
men, but who sent out costly expeditions to observe the
stars and to explore the barren ice-bound regions of the
poles, as if the polar ice would melt and the stars would

22 THE SCOPE OF

cease to shine when we are gone ? Let us awake from ,
our slumber, let us light our lamps, let us gird up our
loins. The Universities exist for the advancement of
knowledge. It is their duty to add this new province
to the ancient departments of learning which they
cultivate so diligently. Cambridge, to its honour, has
led the way in equipping and despatching anthropo-
logical expeditions ; it is for Oxford, it is for Liverpool,
it is for every University in the land to join in the
work.

More than that, it is the public duty of every civilised
state actively to co-operate. In this respect the United
States of America, by instituting a bureau for the study
of the aborigines within its dominions, has set an
example which every enlightened nation that rules over
lower races ought to imitate. On none does that duty,
that responsibility, lie more clearly and more heavily
than on our own, for to none in the whole course of
human history has the sceptre been given over so many
and so diverse races of men. We have made ourselves
our brother's keepers. Woe to us if we neglect our
duty to our brother ! It is not enough for us to rule
injustice the peoples we have subjugated by the sword.
We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to
posterity, who will require it at our hands, that we should
describe them as they were before we found them, before
they ever saw the English flag and heard, for good or evil,
the English tongue. The voice of England speaks to her
subject peoples in other accents than in the thunder of her
guns. Peace has its triumphs as well as war : there are
nobler trophies than captured flags and cannons. There
are monuments, airy monuments, monuments of words,
which seem so fleeting and evanescent, that will yet last
when your cannons have crumbled and your flags have
mouldered into dust. When the Roman poet wished
to present an image of perpetuity, he said that he would
be remembered so long as the Roman Empire endured,
so long as the white-robed procession of the Vestals and

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23

Pontiffs should ascend the Capitol to pray in the temple
of Jupiter. That solemn procession has long ceased to
climb the slope of the Capitol, the Roman Empire itself
has long passed away, like the empire of Alexander,
like the empire of Charlemagne, like the empire of
Spain, yet still amid the wreck of kingdoms the poet's
monument stands firm, for still his verses are read and
remembered. I appeal to the Universities, I appeal to
the Government of this country to unite in building
a monument, a beneficent monument, of the British
Empire, a monument

Ouod no7i imber edax, non Aqiiilo im pot ens
Possit diruere, aut mnumerabilis
Annorum series, et fuga temper um.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limituu, Kdinburgk.

By J. G. Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.

The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion.
Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged, 8vo.

Part I. The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings.

Part II. The Perils of the Soul and the Doctrine of Taboo.

Part III. The Dying God.

Part IV. Adonis, Attis, Osiris. los. net.

Part V. Balder the Beautiful. ■

Part IV. in its Second Edition is ready ; the other Parts are
in preparation. j|

Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship.

8vo, 8s. 6d. net.

Pausanias' Description of Greece. Translated by j. G. ^
Frazer, M.A. With Commentary, Illustrations, and Maps.
Six Vols, Bvo, 126s. net.

Pausanias and other Greek Sketches. Globe Svo.

4 s. net. [Eversley Series, t

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