It is difficult to express in adequate terms what Professor E. B. Tylor has done for ethnology. He is the founder of the science of comparative ethnology; and his two great works, _Early History of Mankind_ (1865) and _Primitive Culture_ (1871), while replete with vast erudition, are so suggestive and graced by such a charming literary style and quiet humour that they have become “classics,” and have profoundly influenced modern thought. From their first appearance it was recognised that a master-mind was guiding the destinies of the nascent science. Some idea of the magnitude and diversity of his work may be gathered from the bibliography of 262 items, published between 1861 and 1907, collected by Miss Freire-Marreco, _Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of his Seventy-first Birthday, Oct. 2, 1907_. An appreciation of the labours of Professor Tylor is given by Andrew Lang in this volume. The true significance of the aims of “Mr. Tylor’s Science,” as Max Müller called it, may be best gathered from Professor Tylor’s own words:— For years past it has become evident that the great need of anthropology is that its methods should be strengthened and systematised. The world has not been unjust to the growing science, far from it. Wherever anthropologists have been able to show definite evidence and inference, for instance, in the development series of arts in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, not only specialists, but the educated world generally, are ready to receive the results and assimilate them into public opinion. Strict method has, however, as yet, only been introduced over part of the anthropological field. There has yet to be overcome a certain not unkindly hesitancy on the part of men engaged in the precise operations of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, to admit that the problems of anthropology are amenable to scientific treatment. It is my aim to show that the development of institutions may be investigated on a basis of tabulation and classification. This is the opening of a masterly paper “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent.”[100] Footnote 100: _J. A. I._, xviii., 245, 1889. The tabular method is not applicable to much of the vast mass of material with which Tylor dealt; but the accuracy and systematising of method are found throughout, and were of invaluable service to a science peculiarly attractive to the vague speculator and enthusiastic _dilettante_.