There have been anthropologists, in our own time and before, who have come near to combine both excellences: and in none perhaps are they wholly severed. Least of all do we expect to find both wholly present or wholly absent, in one who has in a sense fallen into anthropology by an accident; and created one science, while he pursued another art. In the Greek compiler who made this ‘the plan of his researches, to procure that human acts should not be obliterated by time, and that great deeds, wrought some by the Greeks, some by men of other speech, should not come to lose their fame’, we cannot but see a man who _meant_--with good or ill success--to be in the best sense ‘a mine of information’. But it is the same Herodotus who put it before him in his title-page ‘to discover, besides, the reason why they fought with one another’; and that is why we hail him Father of Anthropology, no less than the Father of History. Either Herodotus knew himself to be hewing out a new avenue of knowledge, a new vista across the world; or he knew himself to be speaking to an audience of men who themselves were ἀνθρωπολόγοι. That is the alternative, for those who are moved to deny his originality. If Herodotus was not in advance of his age, then his age was abreast of Herodotus. It becomes, therefore, our first duty to ask what evidence we possess as to the phase in which the fifth century held in mind the problems which for us are anthropological. Now apart from the Tragedians and Pindar, Herodotus, as we know to our discomfiture, is the only pre-Socratic _thinker_ whose works have been preserved in bulk: and even his, as we are well assured, are preserved only in _bulk_, not in their entirety. So even the sceptic is driven back upon the alternative, either of arguing from silence and _lacunae_, or of disproving the originality of Herodotus from his very proficiency in the subject. But what can we learn of the state of anthropological knowledge in the days before Herodotus wrote? The task of the anthropologist is, in its essence, to find an answer to these principal questions:--What is Man? What kinds of Men are there? and how and by what agencies are they formed, and distributed over the lands, as we find them? How is human life propagated under parental sanction, maintained by social institutions, and made tolerable by useful arts? And what part, if any, do either ἀνάγκη or λόγος or τύχη play in defining these processes, and the general career of Mankind as an animal species?