“On an irregular and unfenced patch of waste land,” he said, “situated on the outskirts of a small town in which I spent part of my boyhood, there stood a notice-board bearing the inscription, ‘A Free Coup,’ which, when translated into the language of the Southron, conveyed the intimation, ‘Rubbish may be shot here.’ This place, with its ragged mounds of unconsidered trifles, the refuse of the surrounding households, was the favourite playground of the children of the neighbourhood, who found a treasury of toys in the broken tiles and oyster-shells, the crockery and cabbage-stalks, which were liberally scattered round.... Passing by this place ten years later, I found that its aspect had changed; terraces of small houses had sprung up, mushroom-like, on the unsavoury foundation of heterogeneous refuse. Still more recently I notice that these in their turn have been swept away; and now a large factory, wherein some of the most ingenious productions of human skill are constructed, occupies the site of the original waste.” Here we may recognise the three stages in the progress of the science of Anthropology. First, a heap of heterogeneous facts and fancies, the leavings of the historian, of the adventurer, of the missionary—the favourite playground of _dilettanti_ of various degrees of seriousness. Next we see order arising out of chaos, and the building-up of a number of superstructures, bearing the signs of transitoriness and imperfection, finally to be replaced by the solid fabric of a coherent whole. * * * * * In this little book some of the earlier builders on the scrap-heap will be noted—the Greek philosopher, Aristotle; the Belgian anatomist, Vesalius; the Englishmen, Tyson and Prichard; the Swede, Linnaeus; the Frenchman, Buffon; and the German, Blumenbach. These laid the foundations of the science, and each is claimed as the true founder of Anthropology. After these the workers become more numerous and more specialised, and they will be dealt with under the separate headings of the various branches of the subject in which they laboured, rather than in a continuous chronological order. “Meddling with questions of merit or priority is a thorny business at the best of times,” as Huxley said; and completeness is not here aimed at. Mention can be made only of those whose work notably contributed to, or illustrates, the historical growth of the science. It may be objected that too much attention has been given to the arm-chair workers, and too little to the labourers in the field. This is true, especially in the section on Ethnology; but it is necessitated by the compass of the volume. We attempt a brief sketch of the wood, and cannot stop to describe the individual trees that compose it. Detailed investigations, however valuable, have to be merged into generalisations; and generalisations proceed mainly from the arm-chairs.