History of anthropology

The history of that branch of Ethnology which is concerned with the handicrafts of man is very brief. Specimens of the arts and crafts of various races had long been collected in museums, and till recent years they were little more than curiosities or trophies; but, owing to the inspiration of General Pitt-Rivers, they are now proofs of stages in the evolution of human thought or handicraft, or links in a chain of scientific argument indicating the migrations or contacts of peoples.

Augustus H. Lane-Fox (1827-1900) served with distinction in the Crimea. In 1851 he began to collect specimens to illustrate his views. This, it will be remembered, was eight years before the publication of the Origin of Species. So Lane-Fox was to all intents and purposes a pre-Darwinian evolutionist. Few men have had the collecting instinct so strongly developed, but there was invariably some principle or theory that the objects he collected were designed to illustrate. The spoils of over twenty years of intelligent collecting were exhibited in 1874 in the Bethnal Green Museum. The collection was a revelation to students, and was the first application of the theory of evolution to objects made by man. Colonel Lane-Fox succeeded to vast estates in Wiltshire and Dorsetshire in 1880, and assumed the name of Pitt-Rivers. The following year he commenced the series of excavations on his estate which are models of scientific “digging.” The Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, and that at Farnham in Dorsetshire, are fitting monuments of his genius. The curator of the former museum, Mr. H. Balfour, is ably carrying on the methods of Pitt-Rivers, and has made valuable investigations on the evolution of musical and other implements.

Otis T. Mason (1838-1908), of the United States National Museum, paid particular attention to the implements and processes of the technology of backward peoples, more especially of the aborigines of North America; and he was also interested in the wider aspects of human industrial development.

Pitt-Rivers was certainly one of the first to demonstrate that patterns and designs may be studied from the point of view of evolution; but he did not make any detailed studies in this direction. The first systematic treatise in this fascinating field of investigation was by Dr. H. Colley March, who, in The Meaning of Ornament (1889),^[96] utilised certain views put forward by Gottfried Semper in his valuable book Der Stil (1860-1863); but for over a decade the distinguished Swedish archæologist and ethnologist, Dr. Hjalmar Stolpe (1841-1905), had been amassing data to illustrate the evolution and distribution of ornamentation, and he published a memoir on Polynesian art in 1890, which was followed by one on American art in 1896. Dr. C. H. Read,^[97] Mr. H. Balfour (1893),^[98] and others, worked on similar lines, and much valuable research in this direction has also been accomplished by American and German ethnologists.