Excerpt from Primitive Folk: Studies in Comparative Ethnology
The new-born science of ethnography may, I think, be considered as the psychology of the species, just as demography may stand for its physiology, and anthropology represent an enlarged sort of anatomy.
Demography and ethnology study the great facts of nutrition and reproduction, of nativity and mortality - one in the physical, the other in the moral nature of man. Demography compares statistical data, arranges them in series, finds out their agreements and their contrasts, lays bare many a modality of life heretofore unknown or ill understood. Making big figures into an instrument of mathematical exactitude, it, like the Pythagoreans, has taken for its motto, Numero, pondere, mensura. Ethnography too has its large totals - manners and customs, faiths and religions. Ages upon ages, tribes, peoples, and nations, such are the quantities with which it deals, quantities at once algebraic and concrete. A custom, adopted by millions of men and continued during thousands of years, is equal, in fine, to the myriads of individuals who have practised it.
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