one of the higher religions as an evolutionary study of its embryology: the evolutionary law might appear in the first instance as a proximate law of growth. For probably every one of the world-creeds has inherited, apart from its own achievement, a double tradition, a tradition from the more remote and one from the more immediate past. The first may descend from immemorial antiquity, and from really primitive or savage mental and social life; and it has been the task of primitive anthropology to expound and explain the facts that this tradition has deposited. But many if not most of these facts may be regarded as functionally dead matter surviving in the more advanced system of belief, and as not belonging {20} to its essential life. On the other hand, from the immediate tradition much will be found to have been taken over by an inevitable law of assimilation, certain potent ideas which, though transformed, will enter into the very life-blood of the new creed. And these are to be discovered and analysed by what I have ventured to call an “adjacent” anthropology, which will include a comprehensive study of the literature and monuments belonging to the more proximate past of the race which develops the new faith as well as of the races that are its nearer neighbours. Such a method, though not hitherto styled anthropological, has already been applied by various scholars in the different parts of our field; the exposition of the Babylonian elements in Judaic religion, of the Judaic and pagan elements in Moslemism, are examples of it. On the present occasion I would prefer to illustrate it by noting its application to the scientific study of Christianity itself, of which the remarkable complexity, {21} the variety of forms that it has assumed in different parts of Christendom at different periods, seems specially to invite the higher anthropological treatment. Moreover it probably contains a richer deposit than any other of the world-religions from the various streams of thought and belief that nourished the life of early civilised or semi-civilised man. The illustration drawn from our own religion will be also more personally interesting to ourselves; and though the limits of time and my own knowledge may prevent me from putting forth any original statement, yet something may be gained and a more extended interest awakened by a brief notice of what has been and what remains to be done.