The general acceptance of an evolutionary view of life and the world has already deeply affected psychology, philosophy, morality, education, sociology, and all of the sciences dealing with man. This view involves a recognition of the fact that not a single situation in life can be completely understood in its immediate aspects alone. Everything is to be regarded as having an origin and a development, and we cannot afford to overlook the genesis and the stages of change. For instance, the psychologist or the neurologist does not at present attempt to understand the working or the structure of the human brain through the adult brain alone. He supplements his studies of the adult brain by observations on the workings of the infant mind, or by an examination of the structure of the infant brain. And he goes farther than this from the immediate aspects of his problem -he examines the mental life and the brain of the monkey, the dog, the rat, the fish, the frog, and of every form of life possessing a nervous system, down to those having only a single cell;

1

1 Introductory chapter from A Source Book for Social Origins: Psychological Standpoint, Ethnological Materials, and Classified Bibliographies for the Interpretation of Savage Society. The University of Chicago Press. To be published September 15, 1909.

and at every point he has a chance of catching a suggestion of the meaning of brain structure and of mind. In the lower orders of brain the structure and meaning are writ large, and by working up from the simpler to the more complex types, and noting the modification of structure and function point by point, the student is finally able to understand the frightfully intricate human organ, or has the best chance of doing so. Similarly the biological sciences practice a rigid genetic and comparative method. They recognize life as a continuum, and they pay more attention to its simpler manifestations, perhaps, than to its higher, because the beginning of the whole process is most significant. They are there nearer to the source and secret of life itself.

But it is a somewhat singular fact that while the social sciences have been profoundly influenced by the theory of evolution as developed by the biologists, and have imitated the methods developed by the biological sciences in the study of plant and animal life, they have generally failed to connect their studies of society with the researches of anthropology and ethnology, that is, with those sciences which stand between biology and civilization. And yet the lessons which the sciences dealing with man in historical time have to learn from the life of the lower human races are even more important than those which they have learned from biology.

It is of course entirely proper for the student to limit himself even very narrowly to a special field in order to work it intensively, but the historian, for instance, who begins the study of human activity with Greece and Rome or even with Assyria and Egypt, cuts himself off as completely from the beginnings of his own subject as would the psychologist who neglected all study of child-psychology and of animal mind, or the biologist who attempted to understand bird or insect life without a knowledge of the stages of life lying below these. Indeed, when we consider that the human race is one, that human mind is everywhere much the same, and that human practices are everywhere of the same general pattern, it appears that the neglect of the biologist or psychologist to study types of life lower than those in which he is immediately interested could hardly be so serious as the neglect

of the historian to familiarize himself with the institutional life of savage society.

This failure of the social sciences to regard human life and human history as a whole, and to perceive the significance of the savage for any study of civilization has been touched upon by Professor Robinson in his brilliant essay on History, and I quote his words extensively, particularly since they introduce the question of a modification of the method of viewing historical materials:

"Fifty years ago it was generally believed that we knew something about man from the very first. Of his abrupt appearance on the freshly created earth and his early conduct, there appeared to be a brief but exceptionally authoritative account. Now we are beginning to recognize the immense antiquity of man. There are paleolithic implements which there is some reason for supposing may have been made a hundred and fifty thousand years ago; the eolithic remains recently discovered may perhaps antedate the paleolithic by an equally long period. Mere guesses and impressions, of course, this assignment of millenniums, which appear to have been preceded by some hundreds of thousands of years during which an animal was developing with 'a relatively enormous brain case, a skilful hand and an inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish sticks' and, in general, as Ray Lankester expresses it, 'to defeat aggression and satisfy his natural appetites by the use of his wits rather than by strength alone.' There may still be historians who would argue that all this has nothing to do with history;-that it is 'prehistoric.' But 'prehistoric' is a word that must go the way of 'preadamite,' which we used to hear. They both indicate a suspicion that we are in some way gaining illicit information about what happened before the foot lights were turned on and the curtain rose on the great human drama. Of the so-called 'prehistoric' period we of course know as yet very little indeed, but the bare fact that there was such a period constitutes in itself the most momentous of historical discoveries. The earliest, somewhat abundant, traces of mankind can hardly be placed earlier than six thousand years ago. They indicate, however, very elaborate and ad

vanced civilization and it is quite gratuitous to assume that they represent the first occasions on which man rose to such a stage of culture. Even if they do, the wonderful tale of how the conditions of which we find hints in Babylonia, Egypt, and Crete came about is lost.

"Let us suppose that there has been something worth saying about the deeds and progress of mankind during the past three hundred thousand years at least; let us suppose that we were fortunate enough to have the merest outline of such changes as have overtaken our race during that period, and that a single page were devoted to each thousand years. Of the three hundred pages of our little manual the closing six or seven only would be allotted to the whole period for which records, in the ordinary sense of the word, exist, even in the scantiest and most fragmentary form. Or, to take another illustration, let us imagine history under the semblance of a vast lake into whose rather turbid depths we eagerly peer. We have reason to think it at least twenty-five feet deep, perhaps fifty or a hundred; we detect the very scantiest remains of life, rara et disjecta, four or five feet beneath the surface, six or seven inches down these are abundant, but at that depth we detect, so to speak, no movements of animate things, which are scarcely perceptible below three or four inches. If we are frank with ourselves we shall realize that we can have no clear and adequate notion of anything happening more than an inch,-indeed, scarce more than half an inch below the surface.

"From this point of view the historian's gaze, instead of sweeping back into remote ages when the earth was young, seems now to be confined to his own epoch. Rameses the Great, Tiglath-Pileser, and Solomon appear practically coeval with Caesar, Constantine, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Charles V, and Victoria; Bacon, Newton, and Darwin are but the younger contemporaries of Thales, Plato, and Aristotle. Let those pause who attempt to determine the laws of human progress or decay. It is like trying to determine, by observing the conduct of a man of forty for a month, whether he be developing or not. Anything approaching a record of events does not reach back for

more than three thousand years and even this remains shockingly imperfect and unreliable for more than two milleniums. We have a few, often highly fragmentary, literary histories covering Greek and Roman times, also a good many inscriptions and some important archeological remains; but these leave us in the dark upon many vital matters. The sources for the Roman Empire are so very bad that Mommsen refused to attempt to write its history. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do the mediaeval annals and chronicles begin to be supplemented by miscellaneous documents which bring us more directly into contact with the life of the time.

"Yet the reader of history must often get the impression that the sources of our knowledge are, so to speak, of a uniform volume and depth, at least for the last two or three thousand years. When he beholds a voluminous account of the early Church, or of the Roman Empire, or observes Dahn's or Hodgkin's many stately volumes on the Barbarian invasions, he is to be pardoned for assuming that the writers have spent years in painfully condensing and giving literary form to the abundant material which they have turned up in the course of their prolonged researches. Too few suspect that it has been the business of the historian in the past not to condense but on the contrary skilfully to inflate his thin film of knowledge until the bubble should reach such proportions that its bright hues would attract the attention and elicit the admiration of even the most careless observer. One volume of Hodgkin's rather old fashioned 'Italy and her Invaders,' had the scanty material been judiciously compressed, might have held all that we can be said to even halfknow about the matters to which the author has seen fit to devote eight volumes.

"But pray do not jump to the conclusion that the historical writer is a sinner above all men. In the first place, it should never be forgotten that he is by long tradition a man of letters, and that is not, after all, such a bad thing to be. In the second place he experiences the same strong temptation that everyone else does to accept, at their face value, the plausible statements