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DECEMBER 1913]
ADMINISTRATIVE VALUE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
295
Imperial regions. A man may be what is called a linguist. He may have a working know. ledge of the main European languages and of the great Oriental tongues, Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, which will carry him very far indeed among the people-in a sense, in fact, from London to Calcutta-and then, without leaving that compact portion of the British Possessions known as the Indian Empire, with all ics immense variety of often incompatible subordinate languages and dialects, he has only to step across the border into Burma and the further East to find himself in a totally different atmosphere of speech, wheis not one of the sounds, not one of the forms, not one of the methods, with which he has become familiarised is of any service to him whatever. The same observation will again be forced on him if he transfers himself thence to Southern Africa or to the Pacific Ocean. Let him wander amongst the North American Indians, and he will find the linguistic climate once more altogether changed.
Greater Britain may be said to exhibit all the many varieties of internal social relations that have been set up by tribes and groups of mankind-all the different forms of family and general social organisation, of reckoning kinship, of inheritance and control of the possession of property, of dealing with the birth of children and their education and training, physical, mental, moral, and professional, in many cases by methods entirely foreign to British ideas and habits. For instance, infanticide as a custom has many different sources of origin.
Our fellow subjects of the King follow, somewhere or other, all the different notions and habits that have been formed by mankind as to the relations between the sexes, both permanent and temporary, as to marriage and to what have been aptly termed supplementary unions. And finally, their methods of dealing with death and bringing it about, of disposing of the dead and worshipping them, give expression to ideas, which it requires study for an inhabitant of Great Britain to appreciate or understand. I may quote here as an example, that of all the forms of human head-hunting and other ceremonial murder that have come within my cognisance, either as an administrator or investigator, not one has originated in callousness or cruelty of character. Indeed, from the point of view of the perpetrators, they are invariably resorted to for the temporal or spiritual benefit of themselves or their tribe. In making this remark, I must not be understood as proposing that they should not be put down, wherever that is practicable. I am merely trying now to give an athropological explanation of human phenomena.
In very many parts of the British Empire, the routine of daily life and the notions that govern it often find no counterparts of any kind in those of the British Isles, in such matters as personal habits and etiquette on occasions of social intercourse. And yet, perhaps, nothing estranges the administrator from his people more than mistakes on these points. It is small matters-such as the mode of salutation, forms of address and politeness, as rules of precedence, hospitality, and decency, as recognition of superstitions, however apparently unreasonable-which largely govern social relations, which no stranger can afford to ignore, and which at the same time cannot be ascertained and observed correctly without due study.
The considerations so far urged to-day have carried us through the points of the nature and scope of the science of anthropology, the mental equipment necessary for the useful pursuit of it, the methods by which it can be successfully studied, the extent and nature of the British Empire, the kind of knowledge of the alien populations within its boundaries required by persons of British origin who would administer the empire with benefit to the people dwelling in it, and the importance to such persons of aoquiring that knowledge.
I now turn to the present situation as to this last point and its possible improvement, though in doing so I have to cover ground that some of those present may think I have already
