Professor Max Muller, who presided over the Anthropological Section of
the British Association, said that if one tried to recall what
anthropology was in 1847, and then considered what it was now, its
progress seemed most marvelous. These last fifty years had been an age
of discovery in Africa, Central Asia, America, Polynesia, and
Australia, such as could hardly be matched in any previous century.
But what seemed to him even more important than the mere increase of
material was the new spirit in which anthropology had been studied
during the last generation. He did not depreciate the labors of
so-called dilettanti, who were after all lovers of knowledge, and in a
study such as that of anthropology, the labors of these volunteers, or
franc-tireurs, had often proved most valuable. But the study of man in
every part of the world had ceased to be a subject for curiosity only.
It had been raised to the dignity and also the responsibility of a
real science, and was now guided by principles as strict and rigorous
as any other science. Many theories which were very popular fifty
years ago were now completely exploded; nay, some of the very
principles by which the science was then guided had been discarded.
Among all serious students, whether physiologists or philologists, it
was by this time recognized that the divorce between ethnology and
philology, granted if only for incompatibility of temper, had been
productive of nothing but good.