Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/438

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY.[1]

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. IV.

Almost any subject may be classified in more than one way. Anthropology is the science of man, and taken in its broadest sense it embraces everything that concerns the human race. It first received prominence at the hands of Paul Broca, the eminent student of man in his physical relations. Owing to his influence it was long restricted to the study of the human body, but so appropriate a term could not be thus bound down, and today it has come to receive the broadest meaning of which it admits. The Anthropological Society of Washington, which was founded in 1879, introduced into its constitution the following classification of the science: (1) Somatology, (2) Sociology, (3) Philology, (4) Philosophy, (5) Psyschology, and (6) Technology. These subdivisions were adopted after prolonged and careful consideration by such men as Major J. W. Powell, Director of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, Col. Garrick Mallery, the eminent student of sign language and kindred subjects, and Professor Otis T. Mason, Curator of Ethnology for the U. S. National Museum. It has been found during sixteen years' experience that every subject proper to be brought before the society could be classed under some one of these heads.

Here, as will be seen, sociology is made a subdivision of anthropology, and properly so. But this does not in any way invalidate an entirely different classification in which sociology is made the generic science, and anthropology is looked upon as in some sense a part of sociology. It all depends upon the

426
  1. In our last issue (p. 313) it was stated in a footnote that owing to previous publication this paper would be omitted from the series; but as so much of it, as now presented, is new, it has been decided to insert all that seems essential to the general argument, omitting the somewhat extended discussion of alleged exclusively human attributes, for which the reader is referred to the American Anthropologist tor July, 1895.