We have seen that in its beginning the science of man was little more than a branch of zoology, and that his structural characters were the first to attract attention and to form the material of study; hence all the earlier classifications were based on physical features. Gallatin was one of the first to classify mankind rather by what they do than by what they are.

Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) was born at Geneva, emigrated to America before he was twenty, and rose rapidly to the position of one of the foremost of American statesmen, becoming United States Minister to France, and later to England. He noted the unsatisfactoriness of groupings by colour, stature, head-form, etc., in the case of the races of America, and made a preliminary classification of the native tribes on the basis of language. Major J. W. Powell (1834-1902) and Dr. Brinton (1837-1899) elaborated the linguistic classification of the American Indians.

Classification by language had already been utilised by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java, entitled Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, which was published posthumously, 1836-40. The rise of the new science of philology gave a fresh impetus to this method of classification, which was adopted by F. Müller (1834-1898), and utilised recently by Deniker and various other writers.

Other classifications, by means of cultural distinctions, have been attempted. Among these may be noted that based on mythology and religion of Max Müller, on institutions and social organisation of Morgan and Ratzel, or on musical systems of Fétis.

Hippocrates (c. 460-377), in his work, About Air, Water, and Places, first discusses the influence of environment on man, physical, moral, and pathological. He divided mankind into groups, impressed with homogeneous characters by homogeneous surroundings, demonstrating that mountains, plains, damp, aridity, and so on, produced definite and varying types.

Bodin, writing in 1577 Of the Lawes and Customes of a Common Wealth (English edition, 1605), contains, as Professor J. L. Myres has pointed out,^[128] “the whole pith and kernel of modern anthropo-geography.... His climatic contrasts are based on the Ptolemaic geography ... and he argues as if the world broke off short at Sahara.... On his classification of environments from arctic North to tropic South” he superposes “a cross-division by grades of culture from civil East to barbaric West.”

Buffon followed Hippocrates. Man, said Buffon, consists of a single species. Individual variations are due to three causes—climate, food, and habits. These influences, acting over large areas on large groups of people, produce general and constant varieties. To these varieties he gave the name of race. This doctrine was the main support of the monogenists.

The year 1859 marks a crisis in this field of research, as in so many others. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the Prussian naturalist and traveller, spent the later part of his life in writing his classic Kosmos, a summary and exposition of the laws and conditions of the physical universe. Karl Ritter (1779-1859), Professor of Geography at the University of Berlin, published, between 1822 and his death, the ten volumes of Die Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen. These works formed the basis from which was developed the German view of geography as a science of the co-relation of distribution. In 1859 Waitz, in his Anthropologie der Naturvölker, insisted on the inter-relation between the physical organisation and the psychic life of mankind.

Between 1857 and 1861 appeared Buckle’s History of Civilisation, in which the influence of environment on mankind is strongly emphasised. “To one of these four classes (Climate, Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of Nature) may be referred all the external phenomena by which Man has been permanently affected.”^[129] The recognition of the environmental influence has long been a characteristic of the French school. Ripley (1900, p. 4) points out that, wherever the choice lies between heredity and environment, the French almost always prefer the latter as the explanation of the phenomenon. This is seen from the time of Bodin (1530-1596) and Montesquieu (1689-1755), with their objective explanations of philosophy, and Cuvier, who traced the close relationship between philosophy and geological formation, to Turquan (1896), who mapped out the awards made by the Paris Salon, showing the coincidence of the birth-place of the artists with the fertile river basins.

In Germany the exponents of these theories were Cotta and Kohl, and later Peschel, Kirchhoff, Bastian, and Gerland; but the greatest name of all is that of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), who has written the standard work on Anthropo-Geographie (1882-91). Another monumental work is that by Élisée Reclus (1820-1905), Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1879-1894).

A great stimulus to the development of ethnological sociology was given by the school of Le Play in France, the concrete application of whose theories was worked out by Demolins and others, and published in La Science Sociale and separate works. It is the essential procedure of the followers of this school, in their studies in descriptive sociology, to begin with the environment, and to trace its effects upon the occupation of the people, their sociology, and so forth. The method is an extremely suggestive one, and has led to many brilliant generalisations. The danger consists in theorising from imperfect data, and there is a tendency to attribute certain social conditions directly to the influences of environment and occupation, where a wider knowledge of ethnology would show that these or analogous social conditions obtained in other places where they were not produced by the causes suggested.