at home, as his elder brother[1] was an active geologist. His family resided near that of the late R. Philipps, a well-known chemist, and brother of W. Philipps, the mineralogist; and it was mainly through the influence of the Philippses that the Tylor family received its early scientific bias. When residing on the Riviera, at Cannes, he made the acquaintance of Lord Brougham; Mr. Bellinder Ker, a Whig politician, whose father wrote a work on philology; Mr. Hope, who left a large collection of natural history objects to Oxford; and Dr. Falconer, the eminent paleontologist. Young Tylor traveled in Mexico with an old and experienced collector, Mr. H. Christy, to whom everything that was unusual (by whomsoever found) was an object to be carefully preserved. As Christy had been trained by the late Dr. Hodgkin, one of the founders of the Aborigines Protection Society, to interest himself in everything relating to aboriginal man, so Christy trained Tylor to regard nothing as trivial that had any bearing on the mental states of savage men. No preparation could be more invaluable than this for the work of investigation—the collection, analysis, and interpretation of facts—to which Mr. Tylor has since given his undivided attention.
The stimulus of intercourse with cultivated minds is a factor of great moment in determining the career of able young men, and Mr. Tylor seems to have been especially fortunate in those intimate and early associations which depend upon social circumstances. Like Dr. Young the physicist, and Dr. Dalton the chemist, Mr. Tylor came, as we have said, of Quaker parentage; and Sir J. Lister, his schoolfellow, and also his predecessors, Hodgkin and Christy, were Friends, and the Philippses were also born members of the society. Under such favorable associations Mr. Tylor pursued his systematic studies, acquiring a fluent mastery of most of the European languages, and a considerable acquaintance with a dozen more. Without these acquirements he could not have done his work in comparative ethnology, as old translations, made before ethnological science was developed, were not only often useless, but actually misleading.
Dr. Tylor's first work, "Anahuac; or Mexico and the Mexicans," written at Cannes after his return from Mexico, was published in 1861. It gave not only the important results of especial investigations and excavations in Mexico, but it embodied the germ of a new department of the new science of anthropology. As the author was not then much known, and was dealing with a subject still comparatively undeveloped, and perhaps also from its unfortunate title, it did not meet with a success at all proportionate to its undoubted merits. His "Researches into the Early History of Mankind" appeared in 1865, and
- ↑ Mr. Alfred Tylor published his first important geological paper in 1852, in "Silliman's Journal." The views it contains, though much opposed at the time, have been quoted by A. R. Wallace in "Island Life," by Professor Huxley in his "Physiography," by Darwin in his book on "Earth-Worms," and by Sir Charles Lyell in his text-books.
