Excerpt from History and Ethnology
It is the aim of this essay to show the importance of ethnology, and especially of recent developments of that science, to history. During the last ten years there has been in progress, rudely hindered but not stopped by the war, a movement which has brought the two disciplines into much closer relationship than would have been possible: under the conditions which guided the study of ethnology twenty or thirty years ago. At this more remote period anthropology - I use the term anthropology advisedly - was wholly under the dominance of a crude evolutionary standpoint. The aim of the anthropologist was to work out a schema of human progress according to which language, social organisation, religion, and material arts had developed through the action of certain principles or laws. It was assumed that the manifold peoples of the earth represented stages in this process of evolution, and it was supposed that by the comparative study of the culture of these different peoples it would be possible to formulate the laws by which the process of evolution had been directed and governed.
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